ABSTRACT
The discourse function of interclausal connectives has been a source of disagreement in recent times. Some researchers see connectives as peripheral to discourse and omit them from their study of the discourse structure and function. For example, it is found that connectives signaled the structural relations between elements in simple narratives and that they were thus crucial in building a coherent mental model for interpreting happenings in the story world. The role of connectives in narratives, then, is to guide the interpreter as to how to construct meaning for a text. The text is interpreted from a particular perspective within the mental model. The aforementioned findings support a conceptual view of connectives, one in which terms traditionally thought of as connecting clauses, function instead to connect entities being constructed in a mental representation. The conceptual entities activated by the connectives may be found within the current model or may need to be brought to the model.
