Japanese discourse connectives dakara and sorede: A re-assessment of procedural meaning

This paper shows that although the discourse connectives dakara and sorede have both been analyzed as encoding a cause–consequence relationship, they are not always interchangeable. I re-assess these expressions from a relevance-theoretic perspective, in particular, in light of the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning (Blakemore, 2002). Following Blakemore (2002), I argue that the analysis of these expressions in terms of their role in constraining the recovery of cognitive effects cannot in itself explain the subtle differences between their various interpretations, since they are all tied to the same cognitive effect. I show that the differences between these expressions must be explained in terms of the particular constraints they impose on the contexts in which the utterances containing them are interpreted.