Salience-simplification strategy for markedness of causal subordinators: “Because” and “since” in argumentative essays

Abstract

Previous studies have discriminated between different causal subordinators by assessing their lexico-semantics, clausal positioning, and the potential for separating punctuation marks. Distinguishing between the subordinators “because” and “since” in argumentative essays, this study adds to this line of research by a) exploring more contextual factors around these two causal markers, b) incorporating the effective factors in multifactorial models to measure their weights in discriminating between these two causal markers, and c) examining the different weights borne by individual factors from the perspective of markedness correspondence strategies. We retrieved 976 causal complex sentences (488 for each subordinator) from student argumentative essays and applied conditional inference tree models to these data. The results revealed that six factors were effective in discriminating between causal subordinators. The semantic factor clausal relationship indicated preferred clausal relationships introduced by “because” and “since,” while five syntactic factors demonstrated form correspondence to the markedness of the subordinators. Furthermore, conditional inference tree models revealed the factors’ relative weights in discriminating between “because” and “since,” suggesting that writers adopt the salience-simplification strategy to match the markedness of the subordinators in argumentative essays.