A Corpus Based Analysis on Causal Relations in European Portuguese

Although causal relations and their syntactic configurations are well described for Portuguese (Paiva, 1998; Lobo, 2003, 2013; Lopes, 2004; Peres and Mascarenhas, 2008; Mendes, 2013), there is overall a lack of corpus-based studies on the frequency of occurrence of syntactic structures in written or in oral texts, and on the influence of social variables, such as education level or gender.Considering that causal relations can be conveyed by different syntactic structures, I propose an analysis of causal relations as a variable phenomenon (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog, 1968) which occurrence is constrained by social factors. To verify if and how social factors influence the occurrence of causal relations and their syntactic expressions, two corpora of argumentative texts were gathered and analysed. Each token is encoded according to: type of causal relation (Sweetser, 1990), syntactic structure, connector used to establish the causal relation, and position of the causal clause (for adverbial clauses only). The social variables considered are: level of education, gender and age.The results of the analysis indicate that the level of education influence the type of causal relations established and the syntactic mechanism used. For example, juxtaposition is more frequent in texts written by informants with more years of formal education. This seems to indicate that the acquisition (and production) of complex structures is also dependent, among other factors (Diessel, 2004), on the semantic nexus conveyed.