Article

Name: The book review: Masaru Kanetani. Causation and Reasoning Constructions. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2019. xii + 196. (Constructional Approaches to Language, 25). ISBN 9789027202468

Authors: Natalia M. Zaika

Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

In the section Review

Abstract:

The monograph under review is devoted to polypredicative causal constructions in English, their distribution and grammatical features, as well as to the constructional analysis of two causal expressions: just because (of) X doesn’t mean Y construction and because Х construction. Central to the work are the properties of causal constructions and reasoning constructions (cf. It is raining because the streets are wet), where the speaker concludes that it is raining from the premise contained in the subordinate clause. It turns out that causal and reasoning constructions in English differ in a number of aspects, such as the position of the clause, the possibility of nominalization, clefting, etc. Another important conclusion of the work is that while particularizers (especially, particularly) can focalize both causal and reasoning constructions, exclusives (just, only) can combine only with causal constructions. The typological parameters analyzed in the monograph can be used in studying different languages.

Keywords: syntax, causal constructions, Construction Grammar, adverbial clauses

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