This cross-linguistic (French-Armenian) corpus-based study offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of semantic and discourse-pragmatic features of French causal connective puisque (since) with information-structural (IS) and discourse-structural considerations.

From an information-structural perspective, it is argued that puisque introduces a known/given cause, presented as being part of the common ground of the speakers (Ducrot 1983, Zufferey 2014), while car (for) and parce que (because) both introduce an unknown cause as new information (Groupe Lambda-L 1975, Zufferey 2012). However, in many naturally occurred examples, it is not always possible to annotate the segment introduced by puisque as given, since it is not a backgrounded information in the speakers’ common ground. Since givenness is not enough for a complete description of puisque in all usages, we suggest to introduce another IS parameter, (non-)at-issueness (Potts 2015, Büring 2012). Givenness is not always parallel to non-at-issueness, and new content is not necessarily at-issue.

 

From the discourse-structural perspective, parce que introduces a new content only in median position (P parce que Q), whereas when fronted (Parce que Q, P), it introduces a given content (Délechelle 2002). We claim that the position also affects the IS of puisque : this impact is not reflected in the given status of the introduced segment, but can be measured in terms of at-issue (foregrounded) content: We demonstrate that in median position, puisque tends to introduce given, but at-issue information, while in initial position, it introduces non only given, but also non-at-issue information. Although givenness as a procedural meaning of puisque can vary inter-linguistically, the discursive constraints should be universal, which is why we support our claim by looking at different translational possibilities of initial and medial puisque into Armenian.

 

In sum, we suggest to use another IS parameter, at-issueness, in order to annotate the meaning of puisque in all (medial) usages (as introducing given but at-issue content), but also to account for the differences between initial (given, non-at-issue) and medial positions. Our cross-linguistic analyses help to verify the hypothesis about the discursive constraints on the Information structure, but also to draw conclusions about the procedural meaning of the Armenian homologuous connective (qani vor) in terms of givenness.

 

Key-Words : causal connective, procedural meaning, information structure, givenness, (non-)at-issue meaning, common ground, discourse structure, word order, semantics-pragmatics interface, corpus-based analysis, intra- and inter-linguistic variation, semantic annotation, discourse-pragmatic variation.

 

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