Abstract:

In the paper, we explore the ways of expressing causal relations in Czech written discourse with the aim to help improve students' writing skills. Causal relations are fundamental pillars of text construction and significantly contribute to the understanding of the text as a whole. Expressing deeper text causality is a crucial as well as a challenging task in text creation, and even native speakers must learn to construct complex and coherent texts. The paper examines the text creation from the perspective of causal relations in school essays written by students and in texts formed by adult professional authors. For this purpose, we utilize linguistic data from two corpora, specifically Skript2012 (708,668 tokens) containing student essays and SYN2015 (120,748,715 tokens) consisting of texts by adult authors.

From a semantic perspective, we can distinguish several finer types of causal relations, such as cause, reason, consequence, or effect. The ways of expressing these relations can vary in language. In our paper, we closely examine multi-word phrases expressing various shades of these relations, such as “for this reason”, “in consequence”, “the main cause was” etc. We focus on Czech phrases containing the words “příčina” (cause), “důvod” (reason), “důsledek” (consequence), and “následek” (effect). We conduct a detailed analysis and focus on their function in the text. Specifically, we examine whether and how often these phrases exceed the sentence boundary and contribute to the construction of complex relations in student and professional adult discourse.

Methodologically, we investigate the lemmas “důvod” (reason), “příčina” (cause), “důsledek” (consequence), and “následek” (effect) in both corpora. We thoroughly study their role in authentic texts and the extent of their involvement in the discourse. Specifically, we focus on the following points:
i) the frequency of the examined lemmas in both corpora,
ii) their function in the text with regard to expressing text causality, and
iii) stylistic-communicative analysis of the examined phrases (considering, for example, their lexical stability).

Thus, we perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis of text construction in the area of causal relations, focusing on differences in student versus professional adult discourse.

The significance of this study lies in its exploration of how causality is expressed in written Czech, offering insights into linguistic preferences and discourse structures. By analyzing causal relations in two different corpora, the research provides a deeper understanding of how adult speakers and young learners construct written narratives and arguments. This can have broader implications for language education, particularly in developing effective teaching strategies for writing and text comprehension.

Keywords:

Discourse, corpus linguistics, Czech, discourse connectives, student essays, language competence.