Discourse Expectations and Implicitness of (Causal) Discourse Relations

It has been argued that language users prefer causal relations to other types of relations (causality-by-default hypothesis, Sanders 2005). A second hypothesis is the continuity hypothesis (Murray 1997), which proposes that readers expect subsequent sentences to be causally congruent and continuous, hence predicting that causal relations are more expected than adversative ones and that causal relations that imply a non-linearity by presenting a consequence before its effect are less expected than those keeping the forward temporal transition. Finally, a recent study by Rohde and Horton (2010) indicates that implicit causality (IC) verbs (as in "Peter scolded Mary") may raise the expectation for a backward causal relationship.