A computer-assisted analysis of the notion of causation in English

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a shift in English language teaching from the mastery of language forms, especially words and structures to the more semantic notional and functional aspects of the language. The communicative approach has emerged as an organizing principle for giving greater attention to these notional and functional aspects of language in use. Many contemporary language syllabuses designed with the communicative approach as their rationale now focus on certain notions such as time, place and causation, and functions like requesting, informing and generalising, e.g. van Ek (1976). However, the problem for teachers of English is that there are very many notions, and very many ways of expressing a particular notion. The most frequent linguistic devices or ways in which a semantic field is expressed are not generally known. Because of the lack of statistical information, syllabus designers and materials writers have to make decisions based on their intuitions. A few empirical studies show that intuitively-based decisions are not reliable and that there can be a considerable gap between what is prescribed to be taught and what is actually used in real contexts (Pearson 1983, Kennedy 1987a, Williams 1988 and Cathcart 1989). This study attempts to provide a more empirical basis for teaching how the notion of causation is expressed in English. The study explores the following questions: What are the major ways in which causation is expressed? Which specific causative devices are most frequently used? In English teaching and learning, what forms should be taught and learned first? The main focus of the study is on collecting as comprehensive a list as possible of marked causative devices from different sources and then checking the frequency of their occurrence in a large computer corpus of British written English, the one million word LOB corpus. This study finds that the two major ways of expressing causation - explicit and implicit - are both important. However the survey of the existing sources reveals that causation expressed by explicit causative devices has always been the focus in descriptions of English and English language teaching, while the causal relation expressed implicitly, particularly by juxtaposition has been neglected. A frequency list of 130 explicit causative devices is made from this study. The 130 identified explicit causative devices are classified into eight categories. Causative conjunctions are found to rank the highest, closely followed by causative adverbs. The major usage or collocations of the more frequent causative devices are discussed in Chapter 5. The findings of this study provide an empirical basis for the development of syllabus design and teaching materials, especially for courses in English for academic purposes.