Explicatives
Résumé
Explicatives form a rather tricky category referring both to what speakers approximatively perceive as an explanation or clarification of a speech segment and to formal theoretical frameworks (Philosophy, Logic, Semantics, Pragmatics) according to which an explanation is a “transfer of understanding” (Walton 2004) in a conversation. In Modern Greek, as well as in most languages, some words (which in turn may fall under different categories, i.e. particles, conjunctions, adverbs, discourse markers) are considered to be good indicators of explanation (I mean, that is to say, in other words, etc.) even if they do not always put forward explanations. Conversely, prototypical argumentative markers, such as because or consequently, are used to introduce an explanation instead of an argument. Thus, both explanations and arguments trigger sequences of reasoning.