Theories of causation should inform linguistic theory and vice versa

Résumé En

In this chapter, we show how attention to the variety of existing theories of how causation is mentally represented could advance the understanding of certain linguistic phenomena. In the first section, we review the two major categories of theories of causation, including some of the principal challenges that have been raised for and against each category. We identify in the second section a range of linguistic phenomena that we feel would benefit from a deeper investigation into causation--defeasibility, agentivity and related concepts, and causal chains--and also speculate on how theories of causation might inform our understanding of these phenomena. Since the linguistic theories make testable claims about cognition, they give rise to potential connections between syntactic structure and cognition. In the concluding section, we express our hope that further investigations along these lines may pave the way for a theory of meaning grounded in both syntactic and cognitive realities, in a way that has not previously been possible.