Subjectivity and objectivity in Turkish causal connectives? Results from a first corpus study on çünkü and için

Abstract

Corpus studies from European languages have shown that some causal connectives are used preferentially to express subjective versus objective meanings (e.g., omdat vs. want in Dutch). However, there is not much empirical work on non-European languages on this cognitive perspective of causal connectives. In this study we explored whether two Turkish causal connectives which belong to different lexical categories, namely, çünkü (a coordinator) and için (a complex subordinator) are sensitive to propositional attitudes and whether such sensitivity varies according to genre (academic vs. narrative). Consistent with previous findings from European language corpus studies, our logistic mixed regression models offered new insights into subjectivity in the distribution of Turkish causal connectives çünkü and için: there seems to be a division of labour between the two connectives, in that çünkü has a preference for expressing subjective relations, whereas için mainly expresses objective relations. An exception is that speech act relations (e.g., a question, advice, command, or promise) are mainly expressed by için. All preferences hold over genres.