Turn-initial ki ‘because’-clauses as a rhetorical responsive practice in Hebrew Facebook comments

Leon Shor, Pnina Shukrun-Nagar and Zohar Livnat
Achva Academic College | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | Bar-Ilan University

This study examines the pragmatic-rhetorical functions of turn-initial Hebrew ki ‘because’-clauses in readers’ comments on politicians’ Facebook posts. An analysis of 100 ki-clauses, responding to either politicians’ posts or comments by other commenters, reveals that they provide explanations and justifications for claims and positions regarding a particular action, general conduct or way of thinking of the previous speaker, or a third party. It is argued that such explanations serve to either support or challenge others’ positions, both sincerely and ironically, in accordance with the corpus’s dual nature as both a platform for uniting political camps and a battleground for opposing camps. When affiliative, ki-clauses justify the previous speakers, at times by ironically justifying third parties, making them a shared target. Conversely, when disaffiliative, ki-clauses expose the absurdity underlying the position of the previous speaker, often ridiculing them through ironic echoing.

Publication history

Date received: 13 January 2025

Date accepted: 5 June 2025

Published online: 31 March 2026

Table of contents

Causal adverbial clauses have been the subject of extensive linguistic research from various perspectives. Syntactic and typological studies have focused on the structural features of these clauses as part of complex sentences, while pragmatically- and interactionally-oriented research has explored their communicative functions in context. Common to both perspectives is the focus on causal clauses subordinated to a main clause and produced by a single speaker/writer within the same turn/sentence (but see Couper-Kuhlen 2011). This paper focuses on a lesser-described variation: turn-initial, syntactically unintegrated causal clauses that follow and rely on another speaker’s utterance. Specifically, we explore the pragmatic-rhetorical functions of turn-initial ki ‘because’-clauses in Hebrew readers’ comments on politicians’ Facebook pages that function as a response to either questions or statements made by one of the interlocutors (see Couper-Kuhlen 2011, 2012; Ford 1993 on English because).

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