Abstract

 This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian, which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres.
Highlights
In everyday communication, speakers and writers often express their conclusions and feelings
On the basis of distinctive collocates analyses, we examined whether the Chinese connectives kejian and suoyi, which differ in the degree of subjectivity they express, differed in their types of collocates, and especially if they differed in the types of perspective markers they co-occurred with
The collocation results showed that perspective markers as a general type of linguistic cues marking subjectivity can be used in combination with either of the two causal connectives
Summary
Speakers and writers often express their conclusions and feelings. Instead of merely reporting objective causal relations between events in the real world, as in (1a), they frequently utter subjective relations, which involve someone’s reasoning (Langacker 1990, Pander Maat & Sanders 2000, Verhagen 2005), as illustrated in (1b). Subjective relations are not observable in the real world; one needs to take into account another person’s (e.g., the speaker’s or another agent’s) perspective (Sanders et al 2009, 2012) to process the reasoning, and one needs to track the source of information. Subjective relations concern the degree of THE USE OF PERSPECTIVE MARKERS AND CONNECTIVES IN EXPRESSING SUBJECTIVITY involvement of a locutionary agent or a Subject of Consciousness (Finegan 1995, Lyons 1977, Sanders et al 2009). This restaurant is decorated with several art works of Mondriaan, so its owner must be a fan of Modern art
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