Establishing causal relations in European Portuguese: coordination and subordination in a stratified corpus

Abstract

The rigid boundaries of coordinate and subordinate clauses in Portuguese have been a topic of discussion in the last decades (Lobo 2003; Lopes 2004; Peres and Mascarenhas 2006; Mendes 2013). Notwithstanding this, few studies have examined the frequency of occurrence of different mechanisms of clausal connection in written or oral corpora in interaction with the influence of social variables, such as age or level of education. In this article, we focus on the syntactic structures used to convey causal relations between clauses in a stratified written corpus, collected following variationist principles (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968). The different structures used – juxtaposition, supplementation, coordination and subordination – are analysed according to the type of causal relation expressed and the age, gender and level of education of the informant. Our goal is to contribute to the discussion of the mechanisms of clausal connection, presenting new data from a stratified written corpus.