COHERENCE VIA COLLABORATION: A STUDY OF CHINESE CAUSAL CONNECTIVES

This paper discusses the discourse behavior of Chinese causal connectives yinwei "because- and suoyi "so " from the perspective of grammaticalization, and claims that the underlying motivation for such is coherence, which involves pragmatic and cognitive interpretation. We claim that the majority of yinwei and suoyi are used pragmatically, and they are grammaticalized. This grammaticalization of discourse connectives is motivated by "collaboration. " This paper explicitly identifies the semantic and pragmatic functions of yinwei and suoyi. Our findings support that conversation is a collaborative process, and shov1/4 that interlocutors collaborate not only on phrasal or sentential level, but on discourse-level as well. 1