Subjectivity and Causality: A Corpus Study of Spoken Language

Abstract

Connectives and the coherence relations they express are among the building blocks of discourse. It is an important issue to uncover the system behind the choice for a particular connective, because it can be seen as an act of categorization: By choosing one connective over another a speaker expresses that the relationship between two discourse segments is to be understood as an instance of one particular coherence relation and not another (Pander Maat and Sanders, 2001). In this paper we study one specific type of linguistic categorization: the way in which Dutch speakers categorize causally related events by expressing them with the connectives omdat (‘because’) and want (‘for/because’). There is a subtle difference between sentences like (1) and (2), which both express backward causal coherence relations. .

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