Kausale Satzverknüpfungen im Deutschen

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the syntactic, prosodic and semantic behaviour, as well as of the textual function, of causal connectives in present day German. In the first section, text coherence is divided into the domains of spatial, temporal and causal coherence. Spatial and temporal coherence are to a considerable extent encoded by grammatical means, while causal coherence is mainly encoded by lexical means: prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs. In the second section, the most important causal connectives of present day German are described, and their basic syntactic and semantic properties introduced. The third section deals with the linguistic concept of cause, contextualizing it within more general philosophical considerations on causation. The concept of cause is traced back to the underlying concepts of situation and condition. The fourth section is devoted to the distinction between three types of causal connections, labelled as dispositional, epistemic and deontic/illocutionary. Empirically, there are many cases in which a causal connection between two sentences can receive more than one of these readings. The following subsections examine in more detail the syntactic, prosodic and semantic conditions that render epistemic and deontic readings of causal connections possible. The main factors influencing the interpretation are shown to be syntactic, prosodic and informational integration of the connected expressions, definiteness of the cause as well as modal contexts.