Subject: sum : ' because ' versus 's ince / as ' ( 6 . 1043 )

i would like to thank the following persons very much for their judgements , comments and various hints concerning my query : marie egan , duncan macgregor , richard ingham , james kirchner , kevin lemoine , david powers , karen ward , yael ziv and especially karen stanley , who took a poll about my claims among her colleagues ( a big thank-you to them too ) . > from the mail i have received by now , the following picture emerges : including the people interviewed by k . stanley , 7 do not agree with my distinction and 5 do agree more or less . some informants suggest other distinctions between the conjunctions : for one , 's ince ' and ' as ' are more formal than ' because ' ( a view which is also presented in some dictionaries and grammars ) , for another , ' as ' is more formal than ' because ' but 's ince ' is " only suitable for informal conversation but nor for writing " . the latter judgement seems to be in conformity with a prescriptivist view according to which 's ince ' as a causal conjunction is not to be used at all . ( i want to note that i have identified 209 ( = 13 % ) causal since-clauses among 1576 causal as - , because - , for - and since-clauses in the machine readable british - english lob - corpus ( written texts from 1961 ) . most of these since-clauses are to be found in the category called ' learned and scientific writing ' . ) another informant , for whom my example sentence ( 1 ) is essentially synonymous with either conjunction , has the impression that the speaker of ( 1 ) using ' because ' " feels john 's admission more noteworthy , or more important to the narrative , than he or she would if 's ince ' or ' as ' were used . " into the same direction , i assume , goes another judgement according to which ' because ' is " stronger and more explicit and more exceptional . " ( i have found a similar view in the literature and have interpreted it as a consequence of my differentiation : entailment on the basis of a rule or norm is intrinsically less noteworthy , less exceptional than ' real ' causation . ) some people have pointed out the relevance of the position of the causal clause . as a tendency , my rule / norm interpretation is considered to be more in accordance with the causal clause ( be it 's ince / as ' or ' because ' ) preceding its main / matrix clause . however , one informant feels " more comfortable with since clauses preceding , and because clauses following , the main clause . " ( this impression is somehow in conformity with the statistical situation in the above mentioned lob - corpus : only about 9 % of the because-clauses are preposed , whereas 41 % of the since-clauses and 43 % of the as-clauses are preposed there . ) one informant pointed out constraints which may affect the acceptability of 's ince ' as a causal conjunction : " 's ince ' seems to have a much more limited application . for me there is a tense / aspect / ? ? ? constraint between the clauses ( consistent with the temporal meaning it also has ? ? ) , otherwise it sounds forced or stilted . i do n't really like your sentence ( 1 ) with 's ince ' . reversing the clauses makes it more acceptable to me , as does changing ' was ' to ' is ' ( strange ! ) . conversely , changing ' has been ' to ' was ' makes the 's ince ' version even less acceptable to me . " ( probably , the last point in this quotation is caused by the fact that replacement of ' was ' by ' has been ' makes the sentence grammatically acceptable with a temporal interpretation of the since-clause . ) do i have to conclude from the ' empirical ' outcome of my query that my differentiation is not tenable ? for various reasons ( which i hope to develop convincingly in a doctoral dissertation to be submitted soon ) , i do not think so . are there , perhaps , some more people ' out there ' who agree with my claims , but who refrain from simply stating ' i agree ' ? of course , this would not make my query statistically more valid , but it would suggest that there is some plausibility to my non-empirical reasons . carsten breul e-mail : carsten . breul @ rz . ruhr-uni - bochum . de
