The establishment of causal relations from the perspective of sociolinguistic variation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.33Keywords:
sociolinguistics, causal relations, social variablesAbstract
This paper falls under the domain of syntactic variation, and aims at promoting discussion on the role of social variables in the interpretation of linguistic data. Assuming that the same semantic relation may be established by means of different syntactic structures, it is proposed an analysis of the mechanisms of clausal connection that establish a causal relation. Following the work of Schiffrin (1987), Sweetser (1990), Paiva (1991, 1996), Paiva and Braga (2010b), a tripartite distinction cause. This categorization takes three factors into consideration: the typology of speech acts involved (assertive / non assertive), the typology of the relation established (assertion or presupposition), and its domain (content, epistemic, and illocutionary/interactional).
The results of the analysis show that explicative causal relations are the most frequent type of causal relation regardless of the corpus under analysis. When we observe the influence of social variables, it is noticeable that level of formal education influences the occurrence of causal relations: informants with more years of formal education tend to establish explicative causal relations more often.
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