The Dutch language displays a variety of connectives, words that instruct readers and listeners about the nature of the coherence relation between two clauses. These words (e.g. omdat 'because', maar 'but', and dus 'so') not only differ in the exact relation they explicate, but also in their syntactic characteristics. The first aim of this thesis is to unravel the very subtle ways in which Dutch speakers and writers exploit the syntactic possibilities of their connectives to support the exact meaning they want to convey. To this end, the author adopts a developmental approach to the investigation of form-function relations. This approach is related to the second aim of this thesis, which is to present and explain empirical data on both the historical developments of several Dutch connectives, and the first language acquisition of these words. This thesis consists of four parts. Part I (Chapters 1-3) introduces the necessary theoretical background. Chapter 1 introduces the main research question, the method and the Dutch connectives selected for investigation. Chapter 2 presents a definition of 'connectives', and treats the conceptual and syntactic primitives that are generally used to characterize and classify connectives. Chapter 3 shows the plausibility of interactions between the conceptual and syntactic properties of connectives, and introduces several hypotheses on form-function relations concerning connectives. Part II (Chapters 4-8) treats the diachronic development of connectives. It starts with a chapter containing several methodological considerations (Chapter 4) and follows a top-down approach. Chapters 5-8 each provide a first test of particular form-function hypotheses put forward in Chapter 3. Chapter 5 and 6 focus on the diachrony of the complementizers want 'because/for' and omdat 'because'; Chapter 5 presents a first test of a hypothesis on the interaction between word order and the hierarchical structure of discourse segments, Chapter 6 investigates the relation between word order and domains ...