Characterizing French causal connectives through discourse relations and subjectivity. Corpus annotations studies in Swiss French written press.

Abstract French causal connectives have often been analyzed through the lens of the subjective/objective divide. In this framework, objective causality refers to relationships between real-world events, while subjective causality pertains to the speaker’s internal thoughts. According to this traditional view, car is considered more subjective, whereas parce que is regarded as more objective.More recent research argues that such notion of subjectivity is insufficient and proposes a multilayered notion of subjectivity that encompasses both the what —the propositional content of the utterance—and the how —the way the speaker presents this content. This refined view of subjectivity enables a more nuanced integration of additional levels of meaning, such as causal relations and discourse relations, and allows for their investigation within the framework of Relevance Theory. In this approach, causal relations are treated as basic explicatures, discourse relations as higher-order explicatures, and the speaker’s subjective stance is captured by the hearer as non-propositional effects.The main research question is which combination of factors best characterizes the use of French causal connectives: the discourse relation signaled, the subjectivity, the causal connective itself, or a mix of all three? To address this question, we conducted an annotation-based corpus study in which sentences were annotated for both discourse relations of explanation and justification (higher-order explicatures) and expressive subjectivity (non-propositional effects). The results suggest that the 'flavor' of subjectivity arises primarily from the combination of the type of discourse relation and the non-propositional effects of the utterance, rather than from the specific causal connective employed.