A contrastive study of Dutch and French causal connectives on the Speaker Involvement Scale

Abstract

"In this paper, we have investigated whether an alternative account to the categorization of connectives, the Speaker Involvement scale, could be extended to backward causal connectives in Dutch and in French. To this end, we performed a corpus analysis of a number of backward causal connectives in terms of SI. In concrete terms this means first investigating the discursive context in which the connectives naturally occur and re-analyzing them in terms of a scale of increasing speaker involvement in the construction of the causal relation: from non-volitional to speech act relations via, in increasing SI-order volitional, causal epistemic and non-causal epistemic relations. The SI profiles thus developed were further supported by observations regarding the semantic effects of substituting a connective by one with a different SI level