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Connectives: Order, Causality and Beyond

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Formal Models in the Study of Language

Abstract

It is often pointed out that different so-called causal connectives have different causal orders associated with them, for instance non-iconic (consequence-cause) for because, iconic (cause-consequence) for so and and. The objective of this contribution is to determine whether this phenomenological observation has some deeper theoretical explanation by examining what the order really refers to beyond causality. The hypothesis put forward is that the order imposed by connectives does not pertain to causes and consequences as it is usually assumed but to the order of implication (antecedent-consequent) induced by laws, in the sense of non-accidental generalizations. It will be demonstrated that in the case of connectives, laws have the function of the contextual assumptions tacitly invoked as premises in the reasonings that speakers perform when using utterances with connectives such as because, so and, in some cases, and.

The ideas for this paper are an extension of sections from my PhD dissertation accomplished under the supervision of Jacques Moeschler with whom I have had the great privilege to work for several years. I have benefited and continue to benefit from his supportive attitude all along. With gratitude and affection, I dedicate this chapter to him.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Moeschler (2011) who argues that also the French parce que (because) can only introduce a cause in the consequence-cause order and Moeschler (2009) for argumentative parce que with cause-consequence order.

  2. 2.

    See also Moeschler (2014) for an explanation of the non-iconic order of causal discourses.

  3. 3.

    See also Blochowiak (2010, 2014a) for another type of content/basic use of because, the conjectural one, which concerns a speaker’s belief about possible causes of some event (and crucially not about reasons a speaker can have to infer a cause or consequence, as it is the case with epistemic because).

  4. 4.

    Note that there is also a belonging to the class relation in these examples. For instance, the individual John belongs to the class of Englishmen.

  5. 5.

    My proposal here is in accordance with the Relevance Theoretical approach (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) which considers the contextual assumptions to be crucial for the interpretation of temporal and causal discourses (Wilson and Sperber 1998; Carston 2002). The novelty of my analysis is that it takes a formal turn that allows exploring in more depth problems linked to order of temporally and causally related discourses with connectives.

  6. 6.

    For instance, Bromberger (1966/1992) analyzes laws of science taking into account their exceptions in predicate logic and Blochowiak (2014a) extends the Brombergerian view to ‘everyday’ laws and provides an analysis in the Possible Worlds Semantics framework.

  7. 7.

    In all the examples presenting sentential formulae the universal quantifier is assumed.

  8. 8.

    The law of closed systems says that given a set of conditional sentences proved to be true, we are authorized to infer that the corresponding converse sentences are also true under the following conditions: (i) if the antecedents of the conditional sentences taken together exhaust all possible cases and (ii) at the same time their consequents have the property to exclude one another (cf. Tarski 1995: 176).

  9. 9.

    It is interesting to observe that speakers are sensitive to the cause-consequence asymmetry. Indeed, Moeschler et al. (2006) and Blochowiak et al. (2010) provided experimental evidence for the cognitive priority of the non-iconic order in some type of causal discourses with no connectives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de Linguistique, Faculté Des Lettres, Université de Genève, 1211, Genève 4, Switzerland

    Joanna Blochowiak

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  1. Joanna Blochowiak
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Correspondence to Joanna Blochowiak .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Joanna Blochowiak

  2. Batiment Landolt, 7th Floor, Univ of Geneva, Dept of Linguistics, Geneva, Switzerland

    Cristina Grisot

  3. Dept. of Psycholinguistics, University of Geneva Dept. of Psycholinguistics, Geneva, Switzerland

    Stephanie Durrleman

  4. Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Christopher Laenzlinger

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Blochowiak, J. (2017). Connectives: Order, Causality and Beyond. In: Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C., Durrleman, S., Laenzlinger, C. (eds) Formal Models in the Study of Language. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_10

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