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Between Syntax and Pragmatics: The Causal Conjunction Protože in Spoken and Written Czech

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Abstract

Research into causal conjunctions suggests that there are various degrees of causality and that causality is better situated on a cline between strong and weak. Some studies of English because/’cause/cos suggest a diachronic change in the spoken language, where the use of because is shifting from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (Stenström, in: Jucker, Ziv (eds) Discourse markers, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998; Burridge in Aust J Linguist 34(4):524–548, 2014). This study examines in detail the use of the most frequent Czech causal conjunction protože in both written and spoken language, thus making a further contribution to cross-linguistic research into causality and to research into the differences between spoken and written language more generally. There are two major language varieties of Czech: the common vernacular and the standard literary language (the codified norm). These two varieties differ in a number of respects—at the morphological, lexical and phonological levels. In comparing spoken and written Czech, very few studies include syntactic features and none are based on large-scale authentic spoken data. Based on the corpus data, the conjunction protože occurs strikingly more frequently in spoken Czech than in written language. This study looks at some differences in its distribution. The study is based on extensive corpus data of both written Czech (comprising fiction, newspapers and academic texts) and spoken Czech (corpora of spontaneous conversations and TV debates).

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Notes

  1. We assume that there are features that are e.g. typical for spoken English (as opposed to written English) and we may not be able to establish cross-linguistic parallels, while there are features typical for spoken English, where we may be able to claim a degree of cross-linguistic universality.

  2. Page numbers given for Sanders (2005) refer to the online copy of the article available at: http://www.let.uu.nl/~Ted.Sanders/personal/uploads/pdf/Sanders%20(2005).pdf.

  3. Cf. also Czech “příčina” [cause] and “důvod” [reason] (Svoboda 1954; Grepl and Karlík 1998).

  4. Czech belongs to the Slavic language family and is a highly inflected language with a complex morphological system. Historical events connected to the Czech struggle for independence have shaped the prevalent attitudes to language correctness and have given space to puristic tendencies. Czech is stratified geographically, stylistically and socially, with perhaps the most notable difference drawn between StC and CC (as well as between StC, which is spoken in Bohemia, and the distinct Moravian dialects). However, in actual language use there are no clear-cut boundaries between the two varieties and speakers oscillate between them depending on the situation, and especially with regard to the degree of formality of the given situation.

  5. The H variety corresponds to StC and the L variety to CC.

  6. Recently, for example, Massot (2008) and Rowlett (2011) have argued that French is a diglossic situation. Rowlett (2011: 13) notes, it has been commonplace with French to “claim there had been no significant syntactic change since the end of the 17th century”. With the development of spoken corpora interest in syntactic variation and specifically variation in spoken French has risen (Rowlett 2011: 3) and a potential alternative account for synchronic syntactic variation in French is offered by e.g. Massot (2008). Massot suggests the diglossic approach primarily in response to the extensive research into spoken French (e.g. Blanche-Benveniste 1997, 2003, 2004) and he considers the distinctions between “spoken” and “written” insufficient to explain syntactic variation. He explains the variation in terms of two distinct internal grammars of French (that of the vernacular and that of the more prestigious variety acquired later — note here the parallel with Czech) that speakers have access to, while maintaining that this distinction is not the same as the distinction between spoken and written language (Rowlett 2011). However, all languages with evolved literary tradition to some degree could be considered from this point of view. Learning to write a language always requires adjustments of the spoken variety.

  7. Cf. also Linear Unit Grammar: Integrating Speech and Writing (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006).

  8. Examples with letters are examples from literature review and examples with consecutive numbering are authentic examples from our data (in brackets is the corpus/subcorpus from which the example is taken).

  9. And these certainly have cross-linguistic validity. See also Sinclair and Mauranen (2006).

  10. For French, see e.g. Debaisieux (2013).

  11. For an interesting account of the use of because in the web communications (e.g. Twitter) see Bohman (2016).

  12. Schiffrin analyzes the following as DMs: and, because, but, I mean, now, oh, or, so, then, well, y‘know.

  13. Fraser (2006) uses the “cover term” pragmatic markers (expressions that “occur as part of a discourse segment but are not part of the propositional content of the message”) and distinguishes between four types of pragmatic markers. DMs (that “signal a relation between the discourse segment which hosts them, and the prior discourse segment”) are one of them. Fraser claims that there are over 100 DMs in English, which can be divided into four basic semantic relationships (contrastive, elaborative, inferential, and temporal markers). Aijmer seems to prefer the term pragmatic marker as well (Aijmer 2013). For further discussion of terminology and theoretical approaches to DMs, see e.g. Fischer (2005), for contrastive studies of pragmatic markers see Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen (2006).

  14. Crystal (1988: 48) talks about these pragmatic expressions as “the oil which helps us perform the complex task of spontaneous speech”.

  15. But, as further research shows, this is not the case with all discourse markers (e.g. Brinton 1996).

  16. Fraser (2006) mentions that “[o]ne area which requires more investigation is the extent to which there is polysemy throughout the class of DMs”.

  17. For diachronic distribution of the two main Czech causal conjunctions protože and neboť, see http://syd.korpus.cz/ipP7hWCE.dia.

  18. For an overview of the frequency distribution between protože and neboť in spoken and written language, see http://syd.korpus.cz/ipP7hWCE.syn.

  19. The corpora were chosen in analogy to LGSWE (Biber et al. 1999) but in the case of the spoken language we opted for two varieties.

  20. Data are freely available at www.korpus.cz.

  21. More detailed information is available at http://wiki.korpus.cz/doku.php/en:cnk:oral2013.

  22. http://ujc.dialogy.cz/?q=en/node/83.

  23. The lemmatised spoken corpus will be made available later in 2017.

  24. Capitalisation indicate lemma, i.e. overall frequency of all forms including reduced variants.

  25. Schiffrin (1987), however, maintains that one of the important features of a DM is its simultaneous anaphoric and cataphoric function.

  26. For the spoken data we used a pilot version of automatic annotation, which does not reach the accuracy of the annotation of the written data.

  27. Using X 2, at p < .001.

  28. Small town in Moravia.

  29. Šopáč is probably a place name.

  30. Ne means ‘no’ but can be used colloquially without having the negative meaning, see example 12.

  31. One of the anonymous reviewers pointed to the fact that it is probably quite common at this point, especially if our online processing has not been completed in terms of syntax. While we are saying the first clause, we may be weighing up the listener’s reaction to what we are saying and reconfiguring it.

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Funding

This study is a result of the research funded by the Czech Science Foundation as the project GA ČR 15-01116S “Syntax of spoken Czech”.

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  1. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Anna Čermáková, Zuzana Komrsková, Marie Kopřivová & Petra Poukarová

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  1. Anna Čermáková
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  2. Zuzana Komrsková
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  3. Marie Kopřivová
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Correspondence to Anna Čermáková.

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We would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their suggestions and comments.

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Čermáková, A., Komrsková, Z., Kopřivová, M. et al. Between Syntax and Pragmatics: The Causal Conjunction Protože in Spoken and Written Czech. Corpus Pragmatics 1, 393–414 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-017-0014-y

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