ABSTRACT
Anyone reading academic treatises, reference books or quality newspapers with any regularity will be struck by the recurrence of a particular kind of multi-word unit. Typical examples are it is argued that, it is a fair guess that or the same goes for. Curiously enough, such firmly established phrases seem to have escaped scholarly notice until fairly recently. As a result, they have never been dealt with in any extensive manner, with the exception perhaps of Gallagher’s (1992) ground-breaking article on the translation of the German discourse device erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass, Grieve’s (1996) dictionary of French connectors and four recent articles by Siepmann (2000, 2001a) and Oakey (2002a, 2002b). The first part of this study, then, may be seen as an attempt to redress a perceived imbalance between the poor stock of knowledge about the routine formulae in question and the somewhat larger body of research on related one-word connectives.
