Martin & Rose (2007: 128):
When Helena’s first marriage failed, she explained why it failed, using all because:
An extremely short marriage to someone else failed
all because I married to forget.
The conjunction because means that one event obligates another to happen, as cause and effect. By saying all because, Helena makes this obligatory relation even stronger, i.e. there was only one reason - I married to forget. In other words, cause modulates the relations between one event and the next, and like other such modal meanings (described in Chapter 2 , section 2 .2 ) it is gradable; for example, she could also have weakened the causal relation with partly because. This is an important principle, particularly in science writing, where the strength of causal relations is carefully evaluated.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, Here Martin & Rose confuse metafunctions: ideational causation with interpersonal modality (modulation: obligation). The type of cause here involves the logical relation 'because P, so result Q'. Obligation, on the other hand, is the scale between 'do!' and 'don't!': graded from 'required' to 'supposed' to 'allowed'.
[2] This misunderstands cause. To be clear, cause is not gradable: either X is construed as a cause of Y, or it isn't. The variable here is not the relative strength of a causal relation, but whether a result has a single cause (all because) or multiple causes (partly because).
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