[Book review] Review of Bardzokas, Valandis - Causality and connectives : from Grice to relevance (John Benjamins)

Abstract

“Causality and connectives: From Grice to relevance” serves perfectly the purpose of drawing attention to a topic that has oddly enough not received the amount of attention it deserves in the semantics/pragmatics literature. Despite its rather promising title, however, it will not satisfy those who are after a general, perhaps even cross-linguistic analysis of the meaning of causal connectives. As Bardzokas makes clear right from the beginning of his book, the bulk of the argumentation contained therein deals with the meaning of the Modern Greek causal connectives ‘γiati’ and ‘epeiδi’, and mainly (even though not exclusively) by extension ‘because’ too. The crucial point here is that even though both these connectives correspond to a single lexeme in English, they cannot be interchangeably used across contexts in Modern Greek, which potentially means that by looking into their meaning, one can get a more thorough idea of the distinct types of causation that can be linguistically expressed in general. [Excerpt]