Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Degand, Liesbeth

Titel

A situation-based approach to causation in Dutch with some implications for text generation

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1997

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The point of departure of our investigations has been the observation that causation may be expressed in natural language by a wide variety of linguistic forms. From this variety, we have selected a number of Dutch causal constructions for a more thorough investigation: causal connectives, prepositions, and auxiliaries. In traditional linguistic descriptions these different forms are treated in isolation from one another. In this study, we have opted for a holistic approach to language so as to account for the phenomenon of causal expression in a unified way. Our hypothesis was that causal expressions all share a common underlying meaning, which we have referred to as the causative situation. Given the observation that the various causal alternatives are not in free variation in discourse, we have hypothesized that this distribution must be constrained. It was our aim to identify some of the constraints that play a role in the selection of causal forms in language production. To reach this goal, we have proposed to make use of a multifunctional theory of language: Systemic Functional Linguistics. Within this linguistic theory, language is considered as being embedded in a context of situation with all linguistic expressions being ultimately determined by this context. In this perspective, context and semantic environment play a fundamental role in the meaning of any linguistic structure; with meaning being defined as 'use in interaction'. This approach to language appeared to be particularly relevant to our study, because it allows us to give an explicit account of aspects of language that fall out of the traditional scope of linguistic description, namely accounts of genre, register, discourse semantics, etc. It appeared that these aspects of language may play a predominant role in the selection of one or another causal structure. More specifically, we observed that genre and register influence the frequency of particular causal alternatives. Hence, it is important to acknowledge that our own findings were restricted to a collection of related genres, namely written press.