3 New perspectives on car and parce que: Is it about subjectivity, reasoning or speakers?
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Joanna Blochowiak
Abstract
In contemporary French, the difference between the causal connectives parce que and car is traditionally related to the prototypical causal relations they are meant to convey. The main claim has been that car more frequently conveys subjective relations whereas parce que is equally well-suited for both subjective and objective relations. Nevertheless, in the recent years, empirical evidence offered by a number of studies suggests that car has gained ground over parce que in expressing objective relations too. Despite the decline of car in oral speech, its presence is still widely attested in the written press, in SMS and in chats. In this chapter, we present the results of an exploratory study in which we compare how university students aged 19-25 (Experiment 1) and other native speakers, aged 20-70 and recruited via a crowdsourcing platform (Experiment 2), evaluate the acceptability of objective and subjective relations expressed with car and parce que. Our study reveals significant differences between the two target groups of participants. The results show that the mapping between the subjective-objective divide and the two French causal connectives depends on the type of relation (i.e., subjective relations are overall less acceptable than objective causal relations) and on the connective (i.e., parce que does not seem to fit objective and subjective relations equally well, but this applies only to older people). This suggests that the use of the two connectives to express subjective and objective relations may also depend on the speakers’ educational background, reasoning skills, and age.
Abstract
In contemporary French, the difference between the causal connectives parce que and car is traditionally related to the prototypical causal relations they are meant to convey. The main claim has been that car more frequently conveys subjective relations whereas parce que is equally well-suited for both subjective and objective relations. Nevertheless, in the recent years, empirical evidence offered by a number of studies suggests that car has gained ground over parce que in expressing objective relations too. Despite the decline of car in oral speech, its presence is still widely attested in the written press, in SMS and in chats. In this chapter, we present the results of an exploratory study in which we compare how university students aged 19-25 (Experiment 1) and other native speakers, aged 20-70 and recruited via a crowdsourcing platform (Experiment 2), evaluate the acceptability of objective and subjective relations expressed with car and parce que. Our study reveals significant differences between the two target groups of participants. The results show that the mapping between the subjective-objective divide and the two French causal connectives depends on the type of relation (i.e., subjective relations are overall less acceptable than objective causal relations) and on the connective (i.e., parce que does not seem to fit objective and subjective relations equally well, but this applies only to older people). This suggests that the use of the two connectives to express subjective and objective relations may also depend on the speakers’ educational background, reasoning skills, and age.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- 1 Discourse markers in interaction: Introduction 1
- 2 Principles of Discourse Marking: An experimental approach of general and contrastive perspectives 17
- 3 New perspectives on car and parce que: Is it about subjectivity, reasoning or speakers? 45
- 4 Individual differences in the ability to master connectives: The importance of exposure to print 69
- 5 Do non-native readers rely on connectives? The processing of coherence relations in L2 89
- 6 How egocentric is discourse marker use? Investigating the impact of speaker orientation and cognitive load on discourse marker production 121
- 7 When do discourse markers affect computational sentence understanding? 159
- 8 Discourse markers and dialogue act annotation for computational dialogue systems 191
- 9 Translating discourse markers: Implicitation and explicitation strategies 215
- 10 Processing polyfunctional discourse markers: Making sense of Hebrew harey 247
- Index 277
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- 1 Discourse markers in interaction: Introduction 1
- 2 Principles of Discourse Marking: An experimental approach of general and contrastive perspectives 17
- 3 New perspectives on car and parce que: Is it about subjectivity, reasoning or speakers? 45
- 4 Individual differences in the ability to master connectives: The importance of exposure to print 69
- 5 Do non-native readers rely on connectives? The processing of coherence relations in L2 89
- 6 How egocentric is discourse marker use? Investigating the impact of speaker orientation and cognitive load on discourse marker production 121
- 7 When do discourse markers affect computational sentence understanding? 159
- 8 Discourse markers and dialogue act annotation for computational dialogue systems 191
- 9 Translating discourse markers: Implicitation and explicitation strategies 215
- 10 Processing polyfunctional discourse markers: Making sense of Hebrew harey 247
- Index 277
