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From: rob@ptsfa.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: non-causal use of 'because'
Message-ID: <681@ptsfa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Jun-85 23:51:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: ptsfa.681
Posted: Mon Jun 10 23:51:14 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Jun-85 00:12:36 EDT
References: <568@hwcs.UUCP>
Reply-To: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Organization: Pacific Bell, San Francisco
Lines: 56

In article <568@hwcs.UUCP> greg@hwcs.UUCP (Greg Michaelson) writes:
>
>One might expect 'because' to be followed by a reason, as in:
>
> He ate the cake because he was hungry.
>
>However, its often used to imply a preceding 'I know that', as in:
>
> He ate the cake because my aunt told me =>
> I know he ate the cake because my aunt told me
>

This sort of thing happens in English a lot but we are often blind to it.
For example, a t.v. newscaster may end his telecast by saying:

	Until tomorrow, this is Joe Newsman.

If you wanted to make literal sense out of the two parts of the sentence,
you need to make explicit what the "until" phrase modifies, e.g.:
	
	Signing off until tomorrow, this is Joe Newsman.
	
This was an important issue several years ago in a certain sub-field (and
theory) of linguistics known as "generative grammar." In a nutshell (no
flames from other linguists out there), the generative grammarians believed
that two sentences with the same meaning had the same implicit (they
called it "underlying" or "deep") structure. In this way they would say
that the two sentences:
	
	He ate the cake.
	I know he ate the cake.

have the same underlying structure but only the first sentence
underwent a "deletion transformation" that removed to unneeded "I know [that]".
In fact, they claim all statements have an
implicit (or explicit) "I know [that]". (When someone tells you
something they are telling you something that they claim to know.
So goes the generative grammarian's argument.)

The generative grammarians used this to show how you could
have sentences like

	He ate the cake because my aunt told me.

that APPEAR to be nonsense when taken very literally.

This sort of example was used by generative grammarians in the 70's
as evidence for their constructs of "underlying structures" and
"transformations" (e.g. the operation of deleting "I  know") in
their theory of language.
-- 


Rob Bernardo, San Ramon, California
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