Title: Subjectivity in causal connectives: An empirical study of language in use
Abstract: The linguistic categories apparent in people’s everyday language use provide us with interesting insights into the working of the mind. In this article we study the way in which Dutch speakers categorize causally related events by expressing them with the connectives dus ‘so’ or daarom ‘that’s why’. These two connectives both express volitional and epistemic causal coherence relations. Their overlapping contexts of use raise the question of why two separate, highly grammaticalized linguistic items exist to express similar relationships. We propose an analysis of these connectives, clarifying their similarities and diAerences, in terms of subjectivity: the amount of speaker involvement. Empirical support for this analysis is presented from corpus studies and experiments in which language users were asked to state their preference for one of the connectives in contexts displaying diAerent degrees of subjectivity.
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-17
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 84
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