How subjective are Mandarin reason connectives?

Abstract

AbstractStudies in several languages find that causal connectives differ from one another in their prototypicalmeaning and use, which provides insight into language users’ cognitive categorization of causal relations in discourse. Subjectivity plays a vital role in this process. Using an integrated subjectivity approach, this study aims to give a comprehensive picture of the semantic-pragmatic distinctions between Mandarinreasonconnectivesjìrán‘since’, yīnwèiandyóuyú‘because’. The data come from spontaneous conversation, microblog, and newspaper discourse, while most previous studies have focused only on written data. The results show that, despite the contextual differences in discourse from each corpus, the connectives display distinctive and robust profiles.Jìránis subjective. It prototypically expressesspeech actandepistemiccausalities featuringspeech actandjudgmentin the consequent.Speaker SoC(subject of consciousness) is actively involved yet remainsimplicitin the utterances.Yóuyú, by contrast, is objective. It typically expressesvolitionalandnon-volitional contentcausalities featuring the consequent ofphysical actandfact,which are usually independent of SoCs.Yīnwèiis neutral in general, with a slight preference tovolitional contentandepistemicrelations, to the consequent offact, and tospeaker SoC.Only one interaction with discourse style is found: in relations introduced byyīnwèi,the linguistic realization of the SoC varies across corpora: significantly moreimplicityet fewexplicitcases in microblogs, yet the opposite is true in conversations. The specific profile ofyīnwèi, depending on the ordering of the antecedent and the consequent, is robust across corpora. Furthermore, the relative importance of the associated subjectivity features is determined. In conclusion, the study contributes to our understanding of causal coherence and extends theempirical database that supports the claims of a cognitive account of causal coherence relations.