Effects of the Dutch Causal Connectives 'Dus' and 'Daardoor' on Discourse Processing

Abstract

Linguists have distinguished between various types of causal relations. For instance, Pander Maat & Sanders (2000; 2001) distinguish between different kinds of causal relations: objective and subjective causal relations. A connective provides explicit processing instructions on how the first segment should be related to the next segment. An eye tracking experiment on the online and offline effects of the subjective connective dus and the objective connective daardoor, shows that there are online differences between these connectives. Objective relations with daardoor cause a speeding up effect of the sentence after the connective in comparison to objective relations without daardoor. There were no differences in reading speed found between subjective relations with and without dus. The online differences between dus and daardoor can be partly explained in terms of their differences in subjectivity. However, there are clues that subjectivity can not explain everything and that the specificity of the connective also might have played a role.