The fluid linguistic zone of causalities: areas of contrast and overlap

Abstract

The fluid linguistic zone of causalities: areas of contrast and overlap Abstract: This article is an investigation of the fluid linguistic adverbial zone of causalities. By conjugating functional and cognitive premisses in order to analyze language in use, we analyze the adverbial relations of cause, condition and concession aiming at identifying the semantic and pragmatic parameters through which we observe areas of contrast and overlap between these categories. The treatment given these adverbial relations presupposes that they be considered categories which present more prototypical members, that is, exemplar members, and more peripheral members, that may be allocated in areas of transition between categories. Ultimately, we argue in favor of a view a non-rigid grammatical categories, in this case, the category of adverbial relations, giving continuity to a trend of studies in functional and cognitive linguistics such as Dancygier and Sweetser (2005) and Neves (2010, 2012).