In: R. Hasan, C. Cloran, and D. Butt (eds), Functional Descriptions, Theory in Practice, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996, pp. 207-235. [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 121]. 6 Causation in Dutch and French: Interpersonal aspects Liesbeth Degand Catholic University of Louvain 1. Introduction Causation is probably one of the most extensively investigated topics in any discipline whatsoever, and in linguistics in particular. From Ancient Greek times up to the present, philosophers have tried to circumscribe the concept, concluding sometimes that it is not definable. In Foulquié and Saint-Jean (1978: 572), for instance, causality is considered as a primary principle, that is "evident, not provable, and presupposed in any rational activity of the mind". Mackie (1980) calls causation "the cement of the Universe" — an idea which is reflected in the scientific notion of causality in the physical world in which "the totality of phenomena constitutes a causal continuum of which any conceptually delimited portion, an `event', is understood as relating causally outside itself and containing causal relations within" (Talmy 1976: 47). It should not surprise us then that causation is such a pervasive phenomenon in natural language which can be expressed by numerous linguistic alternatives. Altenberg (1984) has in fact identified nearly one hundred possible explicit links for encoding a causal relation between two propositions. Any language user is thus