Abstract
Corpus-based studies in various languages have demonstrated that some connectives are used preferentially to express subjective versus objective meanings, for example, omdat vs. want in Dutch. However, Spanish connectives have been understudied from this perspective. Moreover, most of the studies of subjectivity have focused on explicit relations and little is known about the subjectivity of implicit coherence relations. In addition, the role that text type plays in the meaning and use of causal relations and their connectives is still under discussion. This study aims to analyze the local contexts of Spanish causal explicit and implicit relations in different text types by carrying out manual analyses of subjectivity. 360 relations marked by three prototypical causal connectives and 120 implicit relations were extracted from academic and journalistic texts. The analytical model applied is based on an integrative approach to subjectivity. Statistical analyses indicate a particular behavior of Spanish connectives and implicit relations and a three-way interaction between subjectivity, text type, and linguistic marking in journalistic texts. Therefore, this study reveals new insights into subjectivity in Spanish discourse.
Highlights
When interpreting discourse, experienced language users often infer causal relations between utterances, such as cause-consequence or claim-argument
The first research question this paper aims to answer is: To what extent do Spanish connectives show a systematic variation in terms of subjectivity in a manual corpus analysis? Our hypothesis is that porque (‘because’) is a general connective used for expressing both subjective and objective meanings; we expect that ya que (‘since’) and puesto que (‘given that’) are specific connectives used predominantly to express subjective meanings
The present study aims to investigate whether Spanish connectives show a systematic variation in terms of subjectivity in a manual corpus analysis, whether explicit and implicit relations differ with respect to subjectivity, and whether these relationships depend on context
Summary
When interpreting discourse, experienced language users often infer causal relations between utterances, such as cause-consequence or claim-argument. Subjectivity is a complex notion that has been defined from various theoretical approaches in linguistics (Lyons, 1977; Langacker, 1990; Traugott, 1995) Building on these insights, we consider subjectivity to be the degree to which the speaker is involved in the construal of the relation (Pander Maat & Sanders, 2000, 2001; Pander Maat & Degand, 2001; Degand & Pander Maat, 2003). The epistemic relation in (2) is identified as a subjective causal relation because there is a SoC, again the speaker, who does the epistemic reasoning that John must love someone, based on the observation that he came back Both relations differ from the content relation in (3), because in this case there is no SoC involved in the relation: the utterance described a causal link in the real world between John’s love and his coming back. That is why (3) is an example of an objective causal relation
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