Causal markers in tobacco industry documents: the pragmatics of responsibility

Causal constructions in English convey or deflect responsibility more or less strongly depending on which of three causality markers initiate the phrase or clause. Causal constructions initiated by because usually express strong causality, whereas since and as, when used to express causality, convey a weaker, disjunctive relation. The tobacco industry has engaged in a ferocious campaign to deny responsibility for causing adverse health effects like cancer. Accordingly, our data are comprised of corpora sampled from about four million previously internal documents that tobacco companies were forced to disclose as a result of litigation. We hypothesized that the valence of the causal claim (incriminating, exculpating, marketing advantage, or marketing liability for the tobacco industry), would determine the distribution of causal constructions initiated with because versus since and as. Findings confirmed that causal claim valence covaried significantly with causal marker choice. Statements framed with because constructions challenged tobacco's responsibility for causing disease or marketing losses. Statements that incriminated tobacco or admitted marketing liabilities were more likely to use disjunctive (causal since) phrasing. This application of pragmatic analysis to corpus linguistics is shown to be a valuable paradigm for evaluating stylistic means chosen with a view toward assuming or deflecting speaker responsibility in practical discourse.