Perspectives in Causal Clauses
Isabelle Charnavel
April 2018
 

This article documents and explains the presence of logophoric elements in adjunct clauses by studying the particular case of causal clauses. This case study focuses on English 'because'-clauses (and 'since'-clauses) and reveals that expressions sensitive to mental perspective (like exempt anaphors, epistemic modals or evaluatives) occurring in causal clauses can be anchored to the speaker (or in embedded attitude contexts, to the lowest attitude holder) or to an event participant that can claim her own reason for the event. This shows that 'because'-clauses qualify as attitude contexts: the causal relation they express is relativized to a causal judge j that can include another individual than the speaker. Locality requirements (j must include the local attitude holder) motivate the syntactic representation of j as a silent anaphoric argument of because. Furthermore, the constrained range of perspectival possibilities for the causal relation on the one hand, and for the content of the causal clause on the other hand, motivates the presence of a logophoric operator in the left periphery of causal clauses, which is locally (partially) bound by j, and locally and exhaustively binds logophoric elements in the causal clause. In sum, adjunct clauses like causal clauses are understudied logophoric domains that shed new light on the linguistic effects of perspective.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003970
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in NLLT
keywords: syntax/semantics, english, logophoricity, causal clauses, anaphor, semantics, syntax
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