ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

通过对四个英语因果关系短语的结构化检查，我们的文章解决了现有研究中的一个空白，该研究主要侧重于书面语言的产生，而完全缺乏对英语口语的证明。考虑到文献中通常强调的英语连接词的一般性质，我们调查的根本问题是连接词在标记客观和主观因果事件类型之间的基本概念上的潜在作用。为此，我们的研究将传统的语料库分析与主观性变量的“预测性”统计模型相结合，以调查语料库中发现的倾向是否以及如何取决于语言用户通过话语连接词对主观性进行编码的系统偏好。每 本身似乎并不具有因果事件的分类稳定的部分。相反，它们的作用与特定的修辞目的和使用环境有关的预期明确程度有关。