Responsible subjects and discourse causality. How mental spaces and perspective help identifying subjectivity in Dutch backward causal connectives

Abstract

The Basic Communicative Spaces Network (BCSN –Sanders et al., 2009) accounts for crucial semantic–pragmatic characteristics of causal relations expressed by frequently used Dutch causal connectives. BCSN integrates subjectivity theory, domain theory, and mental spaces theory to explain their linguistic categorization. Starting with the original three-way classification of content, epistemic, and speech act use, BCSN represents different uses in separate but connected and embedded mental spaces that are linked to the Subject of Consciousness (SoC), who is present as an actor or concluder in many causal relations. The analytic structure of BCSN explains the contrasts between the backward Dutch causal connectives WANT ‘because/for/since’, signaling speech act and epistemic relations in which the speaker is the implicit SoC, and OMDAT ‘because (of the fact that)’, typically expressing content relations with an explicit SoC. This division of labor corresponds to a cognitive categorization in terms of BCSN. On a more general level, BCSN offers a model for the recursive patterning that characterizes perspective alternation in natural discourse, since the BCSN represents both the author's subjectivity and the subjectivity of other actors in the discourse (such as speakers and characters in a narration), as well as the blends between these perspectives. The analysis is illustrated with corpus examples.