A multi-method approach to estimating subjectivity of causal connectives: The case of ‘poetomu’ and ‘tak chto’ in Russian

Abstract

Cross-linguistic evidence shows that languages often employ specialized causal connectives to express subjective versus objective relations. This evidence mostly comes from corpus studies. However, the phenomenon of connective specialization can also be approached with experimental methods. The present study set out to compare different methods of investigating subjectivity profiles of causal connectives in a language, uncovering the different aspects of connective specialization that they elucidate. A combination of the traditional corpus analysis (Study 1), a connective insertion experiment (Study 2), and a sentence continuation experiment (Study 3) was applied to Russian forward causal connectives poetomu ‘that’s why’ and tak chto ‘so’, which have not been studied in this respect. The results of all three methods show that, across discourse types, tak chto prefers subjective relations more than poetomu, which expresses objective relations. The specialization of connectives is most pronounced in the connective insertion experiment due to the constraining nature of this task and the prototypicality of the stimuli. The corpus study and the sentence continuation experiment show less strong specialization profiles of connectives because they are more sensitive to other contextual factors. Our research illustrates the importance of combining different methods and contributes to the cross-linguistic research in the field.