Abstract
The article analyses the historical origin of the most frequent discourse connectives in the English language. Two specific groups of discourse connectives: primary and secondary are studied. Lexically frozen connectives (primary) arose from parts of speech (particles, adverbs and prepositions) or combination of two or more words. Primary connectives were not primary connectives from their origin but they gained this status during their historical development through the process of grammaticalization. They are mainly one-word, lexically frozen, grammatical expressions with primary connecting function, whereas, secondary connectives are multiword structures containing lexical word or words, functioning as sentence elements or even separate sentences. The paper investigates the historical origin of the most common connectives in English and points out that they underwent a similar process to gain a status of present-day discourse connectives.
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