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Eventive versus stative causation: the case of German causal von-modifiers

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Abstract

Causation is generally conceived of as a relation that holds between events. Apart from a few cursory remarks, the case of stative causation has been widely neglected. The paper aims at contributing to a more balanced perspective by arguing for a stative variant of causation, on a par with eventive causation. The stative variant is analyzed in terms of Moltmann’s ontological notion of tropes. German causal von-modifiers (‘from’) are taken as a linguistic window into our understanding of causation. The study of von is particularly suited to this endeavor, because von-modifiers are confined to expressing the core notion of “direct causation” (Wolff in Cognition 88(1):1–48, 2003). The paper develops a compositional semantics of causal von-modifiers that derives their eventive and stative readings from a single lexical entry and allows for coercive adaptions to account for the observed range of interpretive adjustments. Characteristic features of the interpretation such as the inferential behavior of causal von-modifiers and the holistic effect of the stative reading are traced back to independently motivated conceptual assumptions concerning the spatiotemporal grounding of direct causation. The formal analysis is couched in terms of Asher’s (Lexical meaning in context. A web of words. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) type composition logic.

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Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (project A1 of the SFB 833 “The Construction of Meaning”). Our colleagues in the project, Sebastian Bücking, Frauke Buscher, Julia Lukassek, Anna Prysłopska, and Sarah Zobel, have accompanied this work through all of its stages and have provided crucial feedback, for which we are very grateful. We would like to thank especially Regine Eckardt as well as two anonymous L&P reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at WAASAP 2, Tromsö, June 13, 2014, at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 7, Berlin, June 26, 2014, at IATL 30, Beer Sheva, October 20, 2014, and at SALT 25, Stanford University, May 15, 2015; see Herdtfelder and Maienborn (2015), Maienborn and Herdtfelder (2015). We thank the audiences there for their valuable comments.

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  1. Deutsches Seminar, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Claudia Maienborn

  2. SFB 833, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Johanna Herdtfelder

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  1. Claudia Maienborn
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Correspondence to Johanna Herdtfelder.

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Maienborn, C., Herdtfelder, J. Eventive versus stative causation: the case of German causal von-modifiers. Linguist and Philos 40, 279–320 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-016-9201-8

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