Because is Why!
On the use of lama as a causal conjunction in Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew has many causal conjunctions, which differ both in their syntactic distribution and in the types of causality they express. Here, the colloquial causal conjunction "lama", which is derived from the question word "why", is examined. In this talk, we will discuss the different and various causality types that "lama" can cover, as well as its restricted distribution and how it is connected (or not connected) to its semantics and pragmatics
In this talk, we will look in depth at the causal conjunction "lama" in colloquial Modern Hebrew. Some corpus data will be presented, showing that "lama," as a causal conjunction, can cover three types of causality, which were also attributed to the causal conjunction "ki" by Livnat and Yatziv (2003). These types both revolve around causal relations between real-world events in the content of the utterance, as well as the reasoning of illocutionary acts.
The talk then turns to the restricted syntactic distribution of "lama" clauses, namely, that they are bound to the final position with regard to the main clause.
To understand it and study whether it interacts with pragmatic/semantic inferences, this distribution is compared with parallel cases in English, Japanese, and Chinese in which a causal clause is final-posed. We will conclude that "lama" clauses do not share the pragmatic inferences with final position causal clauses in those languages.
However, like Modern Hebrew, where causal conjunctions differ in structure and meaning, it is evident that German also has two distinct causal conjunctions: "weil" and "denn." We will see how "lama" and "denn" share analogous characteristics. This could lead us to adopt for "lama" the same semantic explanation Scheffler (2005) suggested for "denn" - that it is a coordinative conjunctive that triggers conventional implicatures.
Then, we will see that when derived from question words, causal conjunctions across many languages share the same syntactic restrictions and are bound to final positions.
Finally, in light of data on "lama" and two other conjunctions in Modern Hebrew, "ki" and "biglal ʃe-", we will discuss the idea of embedment and whether it should be considered scalar rather than binary.