A Study Of Subjectivity And Intersubjectivity Of Because-CCS

Causal relation, as one of the basic relations in nature and the human world, is a heated topic for many linguists. Among those English expressions of causal relation, because causal complex sentence(because-CCS) is the most typical. This thesis therefore will mainly focus on because-CCS. Previous studies attempting to classify because-CCS are either too general or too specific, failing to have a unified standard. The diversified meanings of because-CCS are studied from the perspectives of traditional grammar, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the rich meanings of because-CCS still leave much room for further discussion.Language can convey propositional meanings and reflect the speaker’s opinions, attitudes even affections. Subjectivity is a characteristic of language, which reflects the speaker’s self-awareness and self-image in the discourse. Whereas, intersubjectivity means that the speaker pays attention to the hearer’s ‘self’. The construal of because-CCS involves the speaker’s subjective cognition, while intersubjectivity is shown in the interaction between the speaker and the hearer. Based on the theory of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, this thesis adopts a synchronic analysis of the cognitive mechanisms underlying because-CCS, integrating description with explanation and finds that it is motivated by the subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The main findings are presented as follows:1) The speaker’s involvement, the ground’s involvement even the hearer’s involvement leads to the diversified meanings of because-CCS.2) Subjectivity and intersubjectivity motivate the extension of meanings of because-CCS. Different degrees of those involvement correlate with different degrees of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in because-CCS, which form a continuum in the order of less(inter)subjective to more(inter)subjective: descriptive because-CCS < reasoning because-CCS < speech act because-CCS.3) Different kinds of because-CCS have different linguistic representations in semantic, syntactic and pragmatic. Semantically, they present different degrees of causal relations; syntactically, they differ in the sequence of the subordinate clause and the main clause, whether there is a comma between the two clauses and whether it can be used as the focus of negative and cleft sentences and whether it can be used to answer the why-questions; pragmatically, they are used to present real-world causal relation in logic, presenting premise-conclusion relation even speech-act relation.Probing into the cognitive mechanisms underlying because-CCS, this study is expected to offer a better understanding of this structure and the same time, to shed some enlightening lights on the studies of other kinds of causal complex sentences.