Structural causal pluralism and underspecification in the expression of causation

An implicit question in much of the research on the linguistic expression of causation is how the latter might be related to the underlying concept of CAUSE. A better understanding of this relationship is important if we are to explain how the syntax-semantics interface is related to non-linguistic thought. In this research we examine a set of phenomena that suggest that the relationship between the linguistic expression of causation and the concept of CAUSE (as analyzed in much philosophical discussion of causation) is not straightforward; that different expressions of causation might be related to different concepts of causation, as reflected in where in the syntactic tree the expression of causation is specified. We focus here on two different morphosyntactic realizations of causal meaning: verbs that directly express causal meaning (cause, enable, prevent, affect, e.g.) and clausal connectives (because, although, e.g.).The kinds of causal meanings that can be represented in these different morphosyntactic realizations show some differences and some similarities. Notably, there is the possibility (as in English) for a verb to have a dedicated ‘enable’ meaning: e.g., enable, help, assist. This is not so for causal connectives (Wolff, Klettke, Ventura, & Song, 2005), even crosslinguistically (Dixon & Aikhenvald, 2009). Instead there is only the possibility of a morpheme such as because which is vague as to whether its complement is a cause, as is exemplified in (1a), or an enabling condition, as exemplified in (2a). The falsity of (1b) and (2b) shows that the verbs enable and cause are not vague in this way; their subjects can only be a true enabling condition or cause.