How Connectives Influence Subjectivity of Causal Relations in Mandarin: evidence from language use and on-line processing

Abstract

Many previous studies have illustrated the importance of subjectivity – the degree of speaker involvement for the categorization of coherence relations in discourse. Empirical approaches provide evidence for the role of subjectivity in the taxonomy. Causal relations and connectives can be classified by the degree of subjectivity. On-line processing studies show that subjectivity influences the way people interpret causality in discourse. Subjective causal relations, which involve the subject of consciousness (who are responsible for the causality) often result in extra processing compared to objective relations. Processing instructions in discourse help to establish the subjective mental space that is required to interpret subjectivity, and thus, influence the processing of causal relations. In addition, the categorization of causal connectives differs across languages, which provides an interesting perspective of the cross-linguistic study. The current study aims to investigate the role of Chinese processing instructions suoyi-shuo and yushi-hu in both language use and on-line processing. A corpus-based analysis is conducted according to a model constructing subjectivity as four variables. The result gives evidence to the categorization of Chinese causal connectives suoyi and yushi, and cue phrases suoyi-shuo and yushi-hu. An on-line processing study is performed to investigate how processing instructions with different indicators shuo and hu influence processing in different ways. The two studies in both language use and processing shed new light on the interpretation of causality and subjectivity in the Chinese language.