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Part of
Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
Edited by Óscar Loureda, Inés Recio Fernández, Laura Nadal and Adriana Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 305] 2019
► pp. 299–318

Chapter 11
Subjectivity of English connectives

A corpus and experimental investigation of result forward causality signals in written language

| Stockholm University

The current study sets out to investigate naturally produced English causal relations from the point of view of conceptual and linguistic features that contribute to their intended interpretations as Volitional or Non-volitional result. These features include two discourse connectives: as a result and for this reason and the extent of the overlap between the semantic information they encode and the relation type they mark.

The paper reports on a mixed-method approach combining a corpus investigation of result in the British National Corpus (BNC) and two opinion-asking experiments conducted via the crowdsourcing marketplace – Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The findings demonstrate that despite their functional flexibility across different causal categories, English resultative connectives show tendencies significant to mark specific coherence relations. The converging methodology proves that expert linguistic intuitions are shared by ordinary language users and their notion of differences between causal event types.

Keywords: causal relations, crowdsourcing, discourse connectives, subjectivity, volition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Corpus study
    • 2.1Material and methods
      • 2.1.1Coding for result relation types
    • 2.2Results
  • 3.Experimental study
    • 3.1Sentence completion task for obtaining stereotypical instances of Volitional and Non-volitional result
    • 3.2Experiment 1: Testing the effect of an SoC and the connective presence on the relation identification
      • 3.2.1Method
      • 3.2.2Results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.305.11and
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Xiao, Hongling, Roeland W. N. M. van Hout, Ted J. M. Sanders & Wilbert P. M. S. Spooren
2021. A cognitive account of subjectivity put to the test: using an insertion task to investigate Mandarin result connectives. Cognitive Linguistics 32:4 ► pp. 671 ff. DOI logo

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