The English Cause-Focused Causal Construction

The English Cause-Focused Causal Construction

The primary aim of this paper is to analyze the resultative adjunct clause, i.e., (thus/thereby/hence) ~ing participle and provide explicit syntactic, semantic and sociolinguistic explanation on the question what causes the cause-focused causal construction with resultative (thus/thereby/hence) ~ing participle in English. What comes first is either cause or effect clause. This study explores the recent style shift of causal constructions from the effect-focused pattern to the cause-focused pattern. In this study, we argue that the increasing number of the cause-focused main clause with a resultative ~ing participle clause shows the process of the style evolution improving speech/wring style in many respects including syntactic simplification, clarification of the sentence meaning with impact on the focused clauses, and improvement of the flow of speech/writing. The style shift found in the English resultative adjunct clauses, i.e., (thus/hence/thereby) ~ing participle constructions prove to be the style evolution from syntactic, semantic and sociolinguistic point of views.