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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 16:1 (2019) ► pp.51–76

Subjectivity in Spanish causal connectives

Differentiating porque, ya que and debido a que

| Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Recent literature has focused on specifying the nature of causal relations. Although the identification of whether connectives prototypically convey objective or subjective relations has been carried out for languages such as French, Dutch and English, the same has not occurred in the case of Spanish. The present study examines frequently used connectives and lexical cue phrases in terms of domain, propositional attitude, and presence of a Subject of Consciousness (SoC) in order to determine the degrees of subjectivity conveyed by the connectives. The findings show that debido a (que) is a highly specific connective used in objective causal relations about facts which do not involve SoC. On the contrary, the connectives porque and ya que present similar flexibility that result in both being used to convey subjective and objective causal relations. This study supports the assumption of subjectivity being a cognitive mechanism that shows across different languages.

Keywords: coherence relations, propositional attitude, subject of consciousness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Subjectivity and objectivity in the use of connectives
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus and sampling method
    • 3.2Manual analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Results of the analysis of domain
    • 4.2Results of the analysis of propositional attitude
    • 4.3Results of the analysis of subject of consciousness
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 27 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.00026.car
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