Ted Sanders & Ninke Stukker (Utrecht)

Causality in Connectives and Coherence relations

Abstract

Without much risk of overstatement, we may claim that all languages of the world provide their speakers with means to indicate causal relationships. Causal relations between discourse segments can be expressed by connectives and lexical cue phrases, such as because, since, so and as a result. What is the system behind the use of these connectives in English, Dutch and German?

Sweetser (1990) suggested that some connectives specialize in one domain: English since and French puisque would be specifically used in the epistemic and speech act domains. Similarly, German denn could only be used to express epistemic relations (Günthner, 1993; Keller, 1995). Such suggestions were tested empirically for Dutch. In several corpus studies, connectives expressing forward causality were investigated. Their prototypical use is illustrated in (1) daardoor ('as a result'), (2) dus ('so') and (3) daarom ('that's why').

  • De zon scheen. Daardoor steeg de temperatuur.
    The sun was shining. As a result the temperature rose..
  • Het licht bij de buren is uit. Dus ze zijn niet thuis.
    The neighbors' lights are out. So they are not at home.
  • Het was een warme dag. Daarom gingen de kinderen naar het zwembad.
    It was a hot day. That's why the children went to the swimming pool.

Daardoor in (1) expresses a simple cause-consequence relation in the content domain, (2) can only be interpreted as an epistemic conclusion and daarom (3) expresses the reason for an intentional action in S2. These connective-characteristics are robust, and vary from strong preferences to clear restrictions on the relations they can express (Pander Maat & Sanders, 2000, 2001). Daardoor is hardly used to express the other two relations, whereas dus and daarom rather show gradual preferences. Dus prototypically expresses epistemic relations and can be used to express content volitional, but not non-volitional relations. Daarom prototypically expresses volitional relations, but can express content and epistemic relations (Stukker, 2005; Stukker, Sanders & Verhagen, 2007; in preparation). Taken together, these observations show how the Dutch language 'cuts up' forward causality.

How can we describe these systems in a cognitively plausible way? And how are categorizations marked by connectives related to categories of coherence relations (Sanders et al., 1992; Sanders, 1997). Starting from the idea of a direct link between linguistic categorization and cognition, we study human cognition by identifying the mechanisms underlying discourse coherence. Causality and Subjectivity are considered salient categorizing principles. The central hypothesis is that, together, these principles account for causal coherence and connective use, and play a pivotal role in explaining cognitive complexity in discourse. This hypothesis can be tested in at least three ways, exploring (i) the cross-linguistic use of connectives in spoken and written discourse (Spooren, et al, 2007); (ii) the acquisition of connectives and (iii) on-line discourse processing. We will focus on the corpus study of connectives and discuss our (cross-linguistic) methodology and preliminary conclusions for Dutch.

References:

Günthner, S. (1993). "…weil - man kann es ja wissenschaftlich untersuchen" - Diskurspragmatische Aspekte der Wortstellung in WEIL-Sätzen. Linguistische Berichte, 143, 37-59.

Keller, R. (1995). The epistemic weil. In D. Stein. & S. Wright, eds., Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Linguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 16-30.

Pander Maat, H. & Sanders, T. (2000). Domains of use or subjectivity? The distribution of three Dutch causal connectives explained. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & B. Kortmann, eds., Cause, condition, concession and contrast: Cognitive and discourse perspectives, 57-81. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Pander Maat, H. & Sanders, T. (2001). Subjectivity in causal connectives: An empirical study of language in use. Cognitive Linguistics, 12 (3), 247-273.

Sanders, T., J. Sanders & E. Sweetser (to appear). Causality, cognition and communication: A mental space analysis of subjectivity in causal connectives

Sanders, T.J.M., W.P.M. Spooren & L.G.M. Noordman (1992). Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15, 1-35.

Spooren, W., Sanders, T., Huiskes, M. & Degand, L. (2007). Subjectivity and Causality: A Corpus Study of Spoken Language. In: J. Newman & S. Rice (eds). Conceptual Structure in Discourse and Language.

Sweetser, E.E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stukker, N.M. (2005) Causality marking across levels of language structure. A cognitive semantic analysis of causal verbs and causal connectives in Dutch. PhD dissertation Utrecht University. Utrecht: LOT.

Stukker, N., T. Sanders & A. Verhagen (to appear). Causality in verbs and in discourse connectives. Converging /evidence of cross-level parallels in Dutch linguistic categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 2007.

Stukker, N., T. Sanders & A. Verhagen (in preparation).Categories of subjectivity in Dutch causal connectives: a usage-based analysis.