Causal relations between discourse and grammar. A contrastive perspective.

In this talk, I will propose an analysis of causal relations on three distinct levels of analysis: syntax, semantics and discourse (following Blühdorn 2008). The question raised concerns the assumed correlation between syntactic relations of coordination and subordination, and coherence relations at the discourse level. The hypothesis is that the processing of causal relations in discourse is constrained by the affordances of the grammar (cf. Du Bois 2003). This will be illustrated on the basis of two case studies: (i) the paratactic (V2-order) use of the Dutch subordinating conjunction omdat (‘because’); and (ii) the “macrosyntactic” use of the French subordinating conjunction parce que (‘because’) (Debaisieux 2016). My claim is that the syntactically dependent are processed differently from the syntactically non-dependent variants