Conceptual and procedural aspects of causal meaning: Corpus-analytic evidence from Modern Greek Valandis Bardzokas Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 1 Introduction Pragmatic theory has developed out of a constant concern with the determination of the scope of pragmatics as distinct from that of semantics. The overarching priority of this type of meaning enquiry has been to distinguish truth-conditional, or semantic, from non-truth conditional, or inferential aspects of interpretation. In this connection, since Grice’s (1989) work on implicated meaning, a specific word-class has proved central to the examination of the above-mentioned meaning distinction, i.e. discourse connectives. Considering the keen interest that the specific area of study has kindled, it is noteworthy that scientific observation primarily focused on a rather limited set of connectives; presumably the ones that theorists thought would serve most effectively a reliable identification of truth-conditional meaning (e.g. but, therefore). In fact, among the discourse connectives that figured prominently in relevant discussions, but has stood out as the most controversial case. As Blakemore (2002: 83) puts is, the case of but created an industry among semanticists, as compared, for example, to other contrast markers 1 that have not enjoyed equally serious attention 2 . ψlakemore’s comment is even more pertinent with respect to other areas of meaning that have remained relatively unexplored, e.g. the area of causality. In fact, causal meaning has been largely overlooked not only from the viewpoint of the English language but, crucially, from a cross- linguistic perspective. Indeed, a cross-linguistic type of meaning analysis might reveal an array of interesting facts about the phenomenon under investigation; facts which might otherwise remain invisible. In compensation for this partiality in the associated literature, Kitis (1997, 2006) and, subsequently Kalokerinos (2004) investigated the intricacies of causal meaning in Modern Greek, a language that affords two prototypical, monolexemic exponents of causal subordination (more simply, two distinct forms corresponding to because), i.e. jati 3 and epiδi 4 . The main concern in this investigation was to determine the extent to which these two connectives were interchangeable in context doing indiscriminately the job for because. Contrary to initial intuitions, the causal connectives under discussion display differential distributional proclivities, which also seem to highlight distinct aspects of encoded causal interpretation (Kitis 1997, 2006). In this light, jati cannot replace epiδi across contexts 5 . Following Kitis’s work on εodern ύreek (henceforth MG) cause, the foregoing generalization gained currency within a relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson 1995) of meaning analysis (Bardzokas 2012, 2013, 2014). However, albeit extensively argued on theoretical-pragmatic grounds, the suggestion that the two MG markers carry discreet types of meaning did not pass 1 In this paper the terms ‘connective’ and ‘marker’ are used interchangeablyέ 2 Evidence of this kind of selective preoccupation with but is found in the literature on conventional implicature, for instance, Anscombre and Ducrot (1977), Grice (1989), R. Lakoff (1971), Kitis (1982), König (1985), Bach (1999), Blakemore (1987, 2002), Iten (2005), Hall (2007), Bardzokas (2015a) to mention but a few pieces of related work. 3 With an accent on i 4 With an accent on the latter i 5 This argument subsequently received further support from Bakakou-Orphanou (2007).