Between Syntax and Pragmatics: The Causal Conjunction Protože in Spoken and Written Czech

Abstract

Research into causal conjunctions suggests that there are various degrees of causality and that causality is better situated on a cline between strong and weak. Some studies of English because/’cause/cos suggest a diachronic change in the spoken language, where the use of because is shifting from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (Stenstrom, in: Jucker, Ziv (eds) Discourse markers, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998; Burridge in Aust J Linguist 34(4):524–548, 2014). This study examines in detail the use of the most frequent Czech causal conjunction protože in both written and spoken language, thus making a further contribution to cross-linguistic research into causality and to research into the differences between spoken and written language more generally. There are two major language varieties of Czech: the common vernacular and the standard literary language (the codified norm). These two varieties differ in a number of respects—at the morphological, lexical and phonological levels. In comparing spoken and written Czech, very few studies include syntactic features and none are based on large-scale authentic spoken data. Based on the corpus data, the conjunction protože occurs strikingly more frequently in spoken Czech than in written language. This study looks at some differences in its distribution. The study is based on extensive corpus data of both written Czech (comprising fiction, newspapers and academic texts) and spoken Czech (corpora of spontaneous conversations and TV debates).