Defining a connective by the company it keeps: A corpus-based study on students’ (creative) ways of expressing causality using polyfunctional ‘e’ Arianna Bienati 1 , Jennifer Carmen Frey 2 Institute for Applied Linguistics, Eurac Research 1, 2 Arianna.Bienati@eurac.edu 1 JenniferCarmen.Frey@eurac.edu 2 The mastery of explicit connectives has frequently been investigated in stud- ies on students’ textual competences (De Santis and Gatta, 2013; Crosson and Lesaux, 2013; Ruele and Zuin, 2020; Tskhovrebova et al., 2022). Explicit con- nectives, especially highly specified monofunctional ones, offer means to convey meaning in a routinized way, referring to well-established textual procedures of language communities (cf. literale Prozeduren, Feilke, 2010). The use of seman- tically underspecified, polyfunctional connectives (usually coordinate conjunc- tions), on the other hand side, is often a matter of concern in the educational sector. Presumably a sign of less routinized writing that does not show variation on the diaphasic axis and uses a reduced repertoire of elements to convey a broad range of meanings, those connectives are expected to decrease the expressive- argumentative power of the text, leaving all the cognitive load to infer the right connections between text spans to the reader (Calamai, 2012). However, recent research on discourse relations is shifting the focus from discourse connectives to less investigated lexical or non-lexical cues (Das and Taboada, 2018), showing that connectives and other non-connective cues inter- act with each other, both in mutually exclusive and in redundant ways (Hoek et al., 2019) and that also non-connective cues play a role in facilitating com- prehension (Crible et al., 2021). Thus, students not in command of the whole spectrum of connectives, might refer to other means to convey discourse rela- tions successfully, either through rather conventionalized lexical cues or creative ad-hoc solutions, using all the elements that are at their disposal. In the present contribution, we investigate the interplay between the poly- functional connective ‘and’ and the connective and non-connective cues that might contribute to the marking of its functions. In particular, we will focus on the causal uses of the Italian ‘e’ in a corpus of argumentative essays written by students in their 4 th year of Italian upper secondary school in the Province of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. Our aim is to investigate the students’ strategies to express causality when using the underspecified connective ‘e’ and to explore the contexts of these uses inspecting non-connective cues (e.g., lexical and referential), collocations and other connectives in the nearby. The connective and non-connective cues appearing segment-internally will be categorized according to Das and Taboada, 2014, who provide a comprehensive and complete tagset for signaling discourse relations, and evaluated according to their level of integration, using Ágel’s Junktionsmodell (Ágel, 2010), further applied to the educational context by Langlotz, 2014. Furthermore, we compare the patterns found in our corpus of 1