Subjectivity in causal connectives: An empirical study of language in use (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Pragmatics, 2012
While using language to communicate, people constantly produce and interpret utterances that, together, form a discourse. These utterances are connected by, among other things, conceptual relations of addition, contrast, or causality. Such relations have been defined as coherence relations (Hobbs, 1979; Sanders et al., 1992), discourse relations (Asher and Lascarides, 1998) and rhetorical relations (Mann and Thompson, 1988). Speakers of English can use the connective because to express all of the uses manifest in examples (1)-(4). (1) What do you want, because there is coffee and tea. (2) The neighbors are not at home, because their lights are out.
The title of this book clearly places it within the field of discourse-analytic studies. On the other hand, its subtitle orients towards a cognitive linguistic account, as the issue of subjectivity has of late (after metaphor) acquired a very prominent position in research in the field. As the focus within cognitive linguistics has been, however, on lexical semantics and analysis of single sentences rather than larger units of discourse, the reader is interposed between two purportedly irreconcilable approaches. But as Knot et al. (2001: 197) have noted, ''at the discourse level, the dividing line between cognitive linguistic approaches and traditional approaches seems less clear-cut than at the sentence level''; moreover, ''for research on discourse structure, there is considerable scope for the integration of work in cognitive linguistics with that from other traditions within linguistics'' (ibid: 198), as both Dutchphone and Anglophone research in relational coherence has shown.
Linguistics, 2011
In this paper, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whether subjectification occurs. We present the results of ongoing and previous corpus-based analyses of the diachronic development of Dutch want and omdat, and French car and parce que, all four causal connectives roughly meaning 'because'. In addition, we try to show that "grammaticalization studies can gain from the systematic and principled use of large computerized corpora and the methods which have been developed within corpus linguistics" (Lindquist and Mair 2004: x). That's why we have combined two historical and two comparative corpus methods to chart the diachronic development of these four causals. Our study reveals that subjectification is not an integral part of the diachronic development of these causals: subjectification does occur in the rise of these connectives, but in the later stages of their development only parce que undergoes subjectification. Our analyses show that the four methods all have their own merits and limitations, but they are most effective when combined.
Just because: In search of objective criteria of subjectivity of causal connectives
2017
The connective because can express both highly objective and highly subjective causal relations. In this, it differs from its counterparts in other languages, e.g. Dutch, where two conjunctions omdat and want express more objective and more subjective causal relations, respectively. The present study investigates whether it is possible to anchor the different uses of because in context, examining a large number of syntactic, morphological and semantic cues with a minimal cost of manual annotation. We propose an innovative method of distinguishing between subjective and objective uses of because with the help of information available from an English/Dutch segment of a parallel corpus, which is accompanied by a distributional analysis of contextual features. On the basis of automatic syntactic and morphological annotation of approximately 1500 examples of because, every English sentence is coded semi-automatically for more than twenty contextual variables, such as the part of speech, number, person, semantic class of the subject, modality, etc. We employ logistic regression to determine whether these contextual variables help predict which of the two causal connectives is used in the corresponding Dutch sentences. Our results indicate that a set of semantic and syntactic features that include modality, semantics of referents (subjects), semantic class of the verbal predicate, tense (past vs. non-past) and the presence of evaluative adjectives, are reliable predictors of the more subjective and objective uses of because, demonstrating that this distinction can indeed be anchored in the immediate linguistic context. The proposed method and relevant contextual cues can be used for identification of objective and subjective relationships in discourse.
Discourse Processes
Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying question of our investigation is the potential role of the connective phrases in marking the basic conceptual distinction between objective and subjective causal event types. To this end, our study combines a traditional corpus analysis with 'predictive' statistical modeling for subjectivity variables to investigate whether and how the tendencies found in the corpus depend on the systematic preferences of the language user to encode subjectivity via a discourse connective. Our findings suggest that while certain conceptual structures are quite fundamental to the usages of English connectives, the connectives per se do not seem to have a steady part in categorization of causal events. Rather, their role pertains to the level of intended explicitness bound to specific rhetorical purposes and contexts of use.
Just because: In search of objective criteria of subjectivity expressed by causal connectives
The connective because can express both highly objective and highly subjective causal relations. In this, it differs from its counterparts in other languages, e.g. Dutch, where two conjunctions omdat and want express more objective and more subjective causal relations, respectively. The present study investigates whether it is possible to anchor the different uses of because in context, examining a large number of syntactic, morphological and semantic cues with a minimal cost of manual annotation. We propose an innovative method of distinguishing between subjective and objective uses of because with the help of information available from an English/Dutch segment of a parallel corpus, which is accompanied by a distributional analysis of contextual features. On the basis of automatic syntactic and morphological annotation of approximately 1500 examples of because, every English sentence is coded semi-automatically for more than twenty contextual variables, such as the part of speech, number, person, semantic class of the subject, modality, etc. We employ logistic regression to determine whether these contextual variables help predict which of the two causal connectives is used in the corresponding Dutch sentences. Our results indicate that a set of semantic and syntactic features that include modality, semantics of referents (subjects), semantic class of the verbal predicate, tense (past vs. non-past) and the presence of evaluative adjectives, are reliable predictors of the more subjective and objective uses of because, demonstrating that this distinction can indeed be anchored in the immediate linguistic context. The proposed method and relevant contextual cues can be used for identification of objective and subjective relationships in discourse.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2008
Several authors have proposed to describe the meaning and use of causality markers with reference to conceptual models of causality. If a parallel between semantic categories and conceptual categories exists, we would expect that similar conceptual models of causality are manifest across different types of linguistic constructions expressing causality. This cross-level similarity hypothesis is investigated in the present paper. So far, causality markers of different grammatical types have typically been studied in isolation. We argue that for a full understanding of the interaction between conceptual structure and linguistic structure, an integrative perspective on different types of causality markers is needed. We focus on causal verbs (manifest on the clausal level of the linguistic structure) and causal connectives (discourse level) in Dutch. Pursuing the research strategy of converging evidence, we first present theoretical considerations, and subsequently discuss data from language use suggesting that cross-level parallels exist at an analytical level. Then, we report an experiment that aimed to test language users' intuitions on the cross-level similarity hypothesis. The results are interpreted as empirical evidence for the parallels in meaning of causal verbs and discourse connectives. Remaining challenges for experimental studies of language users' intuitions are discussed. #