Perspective marking and subjectivity in coherence relations: A collocation analysis of Chinese connectives

Background & Research questions Connectives such as 'because' and 'so' are frequently considered processing instructors (Britton, 1994; Mak & Sanders, 2013): they provide information on the type of coherence relation involved (e.g. temporal, adversative or causal), and in several languages they also code information on subjectivity, i.e. the involvement of a locutionary agent (Finegan, 1995). For example, the Dutch connectives 'want - because’ and 'dus - so’ (Spooren et al., 2010) and Mandarin Chinese 'kejian - so’ (Li et al., 2013) prototypically express subjective coherence relations. On-line processing studies suggest that the processing effects of connectives are interfered by the presence of perspective markers such as John thinks, perhaps and according to Peter (Canestrelli et al., 2013). These perspective markers all relate to the evidentiality/certainty of the utterance, indicating – just like subjective connectives – that someone’s mind is involved in the construction of the coherence relation. However, perspective marking is not restricted to evidentiality; four other evaluative dimensions can be distinguished: emotivity, expectedness, importance, and necessity (Bednarek, 2006). If subjective connectives and the perspective markers in Canestrelli et al.’s study overlap in the information of evidentiality they convey, it could be expected that language users try to avoid such repetition. However, for other types of perspective markers, this tendency is not expected. Collocation analysis can advance our knowledge on the properties of a discourse marker on the basis of its contextual features. Therefore, this corpus-based study investigates the following research questions: 1. Do connectives of different subjectivity degrees differ in the types of collocates? 2. More specifically, do connectives differ in the types of perspective markers they co-occur with? Method We focused on two Mandarin Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective 'kejian - so’, and a connective that is underspecified in terms of subjectivity and can be used in both objective and subjective relations: 'suoyi - so’ (Li et al., 2013). A distinctive collocates analysis was performed by measuring the association strength between these connectives and other discourse elements. We retrieved data from the CCL corpus, a large, balanced Modern Chinese written corpus. Association scores (G2 and Delta-P) were calculated based on contingency tables of observed and expected frequencies (Evert, 2008; Gries, 2013). Results & Conclusion The collocation analysis generated a list of words/expressions that collocated more often with either 'suoyi' or 'kejian'. The top 200 of these collocates were further categorized into different semantic types. The results suggest that subjectivity information coded in the connectives does pattern with the use of perspective markers, which take a large proportion of the collocates list. The general connective 'suoyi' prefers contexts with perspective markers expressing the dimension of evidentiality: cognition verbs (e.g. think, know), communication verbs (e.g. say, look), modal verbs (e.g. want, may) and adverbials expressing (un)certainty (certainly). 'Kejian' co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to the dimension of expectedness 89 (surprisingly, unexpectedly). No differences were found in the connectives’ preference for co-occurrence with other perspective markers. We will discuss possible implications of these results for the interpretation of the processing results in Canestrelli et al.’s study. References Bednarek, M. (2006). Evaluation in media discourse: Analysis of a newspaper corpus. London: Continuum. Canestrelli, A., Mak, W.M., & Sanders, T.J.M. (2013). 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