Causality and subjectivity in discourse: The meaning and use of causal connectives in spontaneous conversation, chat interactions and written text

Many languages of the world have connectives to express causal relations at the discourse level. Often, language users systematically prefer one lexical item (because) over another (even highly similar) one (since) to express a causal relationship. Such choices provide a window on speakers' cognitive categorizations, and have been modeled in previous work in terms of subjectivity. However, a broader empirical basis and a more specific operationalization of subjectivity are urgently needed. This paper provides in these needs by developing an integrative empirical approach to the analysis of the... Mehr ...