König (1989) argues that there is a relation of duality between concessive and causal constructions. Therefore, he maintains, any account of the meaning of causal connectives like because, via duality, also provides an account of the meaning of concessive connectives such as although. This paper lists a number of problems with König's account. Appealing to notions central to relevance theory, i...

ASYMMETRY There exists a cross-linguistic asymmetry in availability of discourse items among adjunct clauses between because-clauses on one hand, and temporal clauses and if -clauses on the other (see examples (1) for English obviously , (2) for German ja and (3) for Japanese wa; see Hooper and Thompson 1973, Tenny 2002, Sawada and Larson 2004 among others for the same type of asymmetry with ot...

Because (of) is ambiguous between a ‘reason’ and a ‘plain cause’ interpretation. Presenting a semantic analysis within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory, I argue that because (of) always denotes a causal relation between causing facts and caused entites of various sorts and that its interpretational variance is dependent on the ontological nature of the caused entity. Finally, I ...