Subjectivity in Spanish causal connectives

Abstract

Recent literature has focused on specifying the nature of causal relations. Although the identification of whether connectives prototypically convey objective or subjective relations has been carried out for languages such as French, Dutch and English, the same has not occurred in the case of Spanish. The present study examines frequently used connectives and lexical cue phrases in terms of domain, propositional attitude, and presence of a Subject of Consciousness (SoC) in order to determine the degrees of subjectivity conveyed by the connectives. The findings show that debido a (que) is a highly specific connective used in objective causal relations about facts which do not involve SoC. On the contrary, the connectives porque and ya que present similar flexibility that result in both being used to convey subjective and objective causal relations. This study supports the assumption of subjectivity being a cognitive mechanism that shows across different languages.