La causalidad y su expresión lingüística en español y chino moderno

Abstract

Causality is a fundamental category of human reasoning; therefore, languages have specific structures and mechanisms to express different causal relationships. The aim of this research is to make a description of the causal coherence relationships in modern Chinese, in dialogue with the Spanish language. For that purpose, we have proposed a qualitative analysis based on corpus with which to carry out a typological description of linguistic causality according to cognitive and pragmatic criteria, from a set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic-discursive parameters. In our study we demonstrate that causal expression in modern Chinese can be categorized into three prototypical causal domains; at the same time, we evidence similarities and differences with Spanish at all levels of the language; furthermore, we confirm that subjectivity, as a parameter of analysis, is systematically encoded in the causal expression of modern Chinese.