Subjective causality in Dutch revisited: prosody, connectives, and word order

Abstract

In this thesis, the relation between type of causality and prosodic marking, connective choice, and word order in Dutch has been investigated. The results show that type of causality is not associated with word order or the connective that is used. All three Dutch forward causal connectives (cf. ‘so’) – dus, daarom, and daardoor – can be used to express all types of causality. Concerning prosodic marking, non-volitional objective causality causes longer connective duration and is associated with more frequent production of pauses. Type of causality did not affect F0, pause duration, speech rate, or declination reset. These findings do not correspond with prior research by Hu et al. (2019, 2022), who found that there is a trade-off between the use of prosodic and morphosyntactic means in expressing type of causality. The findings do not correspond with the hypotheses of the current study either, as a slower speech rate, longer connectives and pauses, and higher F0 values were expected to be associated with subjective causality. The results were obtained from a revised version of the dialogue experiment that was introduced by Hu et al.