The paper tries to contribute to the general discussion on discourse connectives, concretely to the question whether it is meaningful to distinguish two separate groups of connectives - i.e. "classical" connectives limited to few predefined classes like conjunctions or adverbs (e.g. "but") vs. alternative lexicalizations of connectives (i.e. unrestricted expressions and phrases like "the reason is", "he added", "the condition was" etc.).