Causality and Connectives

Causality and Connectives
Author: Valandis Bardzokas
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2012-01-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027275017

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The book explores finely-grained distinctions in causal meaning, mostly from a relevance-theoretic perspective. To increase the challenge of this double task, i.e. a thorough as well as satisfactory account of cause and a detailed assessment of the theoretical model employed to this end, the current study involves an investigation carried out by way of contrasting the prototypical causal exponents of Modern Greek subordination, i.e. epeiδi and γiati. In addition, this objective is achieved in the methodological framework of contrasting a range of contextual applications of the two connectives against their translated versions in English, realizable by means of because. Despite first impressions, a closer observation of the wide range of applications of these markers in the discourse of coherence relations illustrates divergences in their distribution, which, in turn, are taken to highlight differing aspects of causal interpretation. The proposal for the relevance-theoretic model emanates from a reaction to an array of problems undermining traditional tenets of pragmatic theory originating with Grice’s stance, but is also made in response to the common practice in pragmatic research (since its origin) to pay low regard for the contribution of typical causal markers to debates aiming at the determination of the distinction that has been instrumental to issues of cognition and pragmatic interpretation, i.e. propositional vs. non-propositional meaning.

Causality and Connectives

Causality and Connectives
Author: Valandis Bardzokas
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9027256217

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Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Thessaloniki, 2010.

How to express yourself with a causal connective

How to express yourself with a causal connective
Author: Mirna Pit
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2022-03-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004458565

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The Dutch, German and French languages display a variety of regularly used connectives all of which introduce causes, arguments or reasons, such as Dutch omdat, want and aangezien, German weil, denn and da, and French parce que, car and puisque. Why should languages have different connectives to express the notion of backward causality? The central argument developed in this book is that different connectives express different degrees of subjectivity. In a series of corpus analyses it is shown that the degree of subjectivity of the main participant involved in the causal relation strongly predicts the occurrence of one or another connective. Hence, language users have at their disposal connectives of varying degrees of subjectivity. In an analysis of judiciary sentences, it is revealed that speakers are actually sensitive of this semantic distinction, and sometimes even exploit it for their communicative purposes: in order to conceal their subjective involvement, judges prefer objective over subjective connectives. This volume makes a contribution to the study of language in use, by applying empirical methods to authentic language data. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with discourse coherence, perspective and subjectivity, corpus linguistics and cross-linguistic analyses.

Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition

Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition
Author: Ted Sanders
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110224410

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Review text: "With all these contributions, this collection definitely constitutes a high quality volume in this research area and is a valuable reference to anyone who is interested in discourse and cognition."Han-wei in: Discourse Studies 3/2011

Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition

Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition
Author: Ted Sanders
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110224410

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Review text: "With all these contributions, this collection definitely constitutes a high quality volume in this research area and is a valuable reference to anyone who is interested in discourse and cognition."Han-wei in: Discourse Studies 3/2011

Formal Models in the Study of Language

Formal Models in the Study of Language
Author: Joanna Blochowiak
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319488325

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This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler’s diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

Connectives and Causal Relatedness in Expository Text

Connectives and Causal Relatedness in Expository Text
Author: Benjamin G. Simpkins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 57
Release: 2005
Genre: Discourse markers
ISBN:

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Author's abstract: The combined influence of causal connectives and varying levels of causal relatedness on online and offline comprehension of expository texts was investigated. The current hypothesis was that causal connectives would encourage elaborative processing and online generation of bridging inferences, particularly in the moderately to low causally related sentence pairs. This was predicted because past research has noted causal connectives capacity to elicit generation of inferences online. Connectives were not predicted to encourage inference generation in the higher-related items because the causal bridging inference should be obvious to the reader. To test this, a new set of 24 expository items was generated with four versions of each item representing varying levels of causal relatedness. Results show little evidence supporting the hypotheses. To account for the null findings, the potential difficulty and participants lack of familiarity with the text content are discussed as factors. Suggestions for future research are presented. INDEX WORDS: Discourse Processing, Connectives, Conjunctions, Causality, Causal Relatedness, Bridging Inferences, Elaborative Inferences, Local Coherence, Expository Text.

Causation and Reasoning Constructions

Causation and Reasoning Constructions
Author: Masaru Kanetani
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027262713

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Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings? To account for these and related empirical questions, this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular, the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena, ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.