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I'm trying to find a single term for words that help maintain cohesion in a dialogue, such as:

A : How was the Lion King remake?

B : It was good.

A : And the Aladdin remake?

B : It was equally good.

A : And Toy Story 4?

B : That, however, was not so good...

I guess traditional grammar would class "equally" as adverb, and "however" as a conjunction, but their discourse function (to me) seems to be the same: To allow separate dialogue turns to remain cohesive.

Have you heard of a single term to label both in terms of dialogue/textual cohesion?

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The words keeping up cohesion are called cohesive devices. Note that this term leaves their part-of-speech assignment untouched, a cohesive device can be a word of any kind of speech or even a phrase.

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  • Excellent! Thanks. I thought we should give folks a reasonably good reference to look up; is this a good one: englishpost.org/types-cohesive-devices?
    – Rodrigo
    Jul 23, 2019 at 15:58
  • The content looks OK, but for my taste there is too much and too distracting advertising on that site. But once you have the term, it is well searchable using your preferred search engine.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Jul 23, 2019 at 16:02

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