Abstract
A number of studies of clausal linkage in Modern English have suggested the causal marker because/cos is showing a change in progress from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (via the semantic bleaching of because and its phonological reduction to [kəz]). In this paper, I dispute the idea that paratactic because/cos is innovative. Drawing on various spoken language collections, including those from the Australian National Corpus (AusNC), and on historical examples from a number of Old and Middle English texts, I suggest that the different grammatical behaviour of because/cos is not the consequence of on-going grammaticalization, but a direct result of the complexity of causal relations and the different communicative needs of speakers versus writers.
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