A Construction Grammar-based Study Of Because As A Causal Connective

This work attempts to offer a comprehensive,descriptively adequate account of adverbial clause of reason introduced by because from a syntactic-semantic perspective based on Construction Grammar(Cx G).The research methods adopted in this thesis consist of literature reading,induction and deduction,and corpus analysis.And the data come from BNC(British National Corpus)and related literature.In this thesis,because-construction which refers to the adverbial clause of reason introduced by because is divided into two subtypes: causal because-construction and reasoning because-construction.This classification follows Kanetani(2006)'s classification of causality concerned with because,since and for,and it is on the basis of observation of 3000 samples retrieved from British National Corpus.There are four syntactic forms of causal because-construction: [C2 because C1],[C2,because C1],[Because C1 C2],[Because C1,C2].Causal because-construction marks the real-world causality of events or propositions expressed by clauses.Reasoning because-construction has one syntactic form,that is [C2,because C1].This subtype expresses speaker's subjective view or judgment of events or propositions,and it also expresses the relation between speech-act and events or propositions.The syntactic analysis of because-construction covers tense,aspect,voice,modality,negation,syntactic functions,cleft construction and prepositional phrase because of.It finds that both causal because-construction and reasoning because-construction show no obvious tendency in tense and aspect.But the verbs of causal because-construction are temporal related,and reasoning because-construction uses more modality to show speaker's possibility or probability to his own ideas.As to the negation,it finds that the negated causal because-construction is ambiguous and the negated reasoning because-construction isn't.The position of because-clause and the existence of comma between clauses can influence the semantic interpretation.Because in causal because-construction is an adjunct,whereas in reasoning because-construction it is adisjunct,thus having different syntactic functions.And causal because-construction can be converted into cleft construction and because of sentence,however,reasoning because-construction can't.The discussion of semantic analysis includes presupposition and assertion,subjectivity and objectivity,implicit purpose meaning,relationship between semantic subtypes of because-construction,an idiomatic expression Just because X doesn't mean Y and comparative analysis among because and other causal connectors.It finds that the matrix clause is presupposed in causal because-construction,and the because-clause is an assertion which conveys new information.Information unfolds by proceeding from known to the unknown in communication.According to this principle,the structure in which because-clause is situated behind the matrix clause is the most commonly used in causal because-construction.On the contrary,the matrix clause of reasoning because-construction is asserted.Causal because-construction is objective and reasoning because-construction is subjective,which distinguishes two subtypes.Because-construction is often exchanged with adverbial clause of purpose.As a result,because-construction can express implicit purpose meaning.This thesis also explains that causal meaning is the core meaning of because-construction and reasoning meaning is just a marginal one which is derived from causal meaning.A metaphorical extension link is posited between causal because-construction and reasoning because-construction.