A database of contexts with polypredicative reason constructions in the New Testament

DOI:10.30842/alp23065737193525557

Kuznetsova O. V., Fedotov M. L. Baza dannykh po kontekstam s polipredikativnymi prichinnymi konstruktsiyami v Novom Zavete. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 525–557.

The paper presents and discusses a database of contexts with polypredicative reason constructions in the New Testament. Reason constructions belong to grammatical phenomena that typically draw little attention in even large grammars, with rather scarce information and few examples of them.

The described database is intended as a tool for extracting relevant material for language-particular and typological studies of reason constructions.

The initial sample was based on the distribution of reason conjunctions (used as keywords) in translations of the New Testament into three languages: Russian, English, and French. The raw sample obtained by automated extraction was then manually edited to remove the contexts containing irrelevant (non-causal) uses of the keywords and to split the verses containing more than one reason context. The resulting database contains 1630 reason contexts from 1504 verses which are likely to be translated with polypredicative reason constructions into any language.

In addition to the main database, a smaller subsample of 86 contexts was annotated for semantic/pragmatic types of reason meanings and for the information structure of reason constructions.

In the process, the conventional semantic/pragmatic/informational types of uses of reason constructions were revised. Several new (sub)types are proposed and described. These include, on the one hand, semantic/pragmatic subtypes such as “mixed” imperative and quasi-imperative uses, illocutionary non-standard interrogative uses, evaluative uses, and discourse uses; and on the other hand, information-structure types such as those with both consequence and reason included in the pragmatic assertion, those with accommodated pragmatic presuppositions, and those in which only the causal relation is included in the pragmatic assertion.

The resulting annotation system, which may as well serve as a typological questionnaire (or a part thereof), is presented and supplied with definitions, comments and examples, including those from the New Testament.

Some preliminary quantitative results are presented which were obtained for the Russian, English, and French reason markers using the database.

The database is available online at the Zenodo repository.

Keywords

reason, cause, reason construction, causal construction, polypredication, subordinate clause, conjunction, database, annotation, Bible, New Testament, semantics, pragmatics, illocution, information structure

About the authors

Kuznetsova Olga͏ V.

Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia)

siilille@yandex.ru

Fedotov Maksim͏ L.

Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia)

tequila.lime@gmail.com

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