Discourse and Lexicons: Lexemes, MWEs, Grammatical Constructions and Compositional Word Combinations to Signal Discourse Relations

Lexicons generally record a list of lexemes or non-compositional multiword expressions. We propose to build lexicons for compositional word combinations, namely {``}secondary discourse connectives{''}. Secondary discourse connectives play the same function as {``}primary discourse connectives{''} but the latter are either lexemes or non-compositional multiword expressions. The paper defines primary and secondary connectives, and explains why it is possible to build a lexicon for the compositional ones and how it could be organized. It also puts forward the utility of such a lexicon in discourse annotation and parsing. Finally, it opens the discussion on the constructions that signal a discourse relation between two spans of text.