Swedish linking adverbs, expressing causality, and their role in the semantic organization of the text

Abstract

The article reviews the semantics and text-forming functionality of adverbs expressing causality in the Swedish language based on the material of the works of contemporary Swedish literature and Swedish language corpus. In the Swedish grammar they are categorised as connective adverbs which yield logical, semantic, and communicative cohesion and coherence of the text along with conjunctions. Such adverbs show causation between disctinct sentences in a text as well as between whole fragments of the text.

The adverbs describing consequences alltså, följaktligen, således, sålunda are used in an utterance to express a conclusion based on previously received information. The adverb alltså especially stands out among them since it can not only connect adjacent parts of the text, but distant ones as well, and connect the new utterance with a distant previous context. In the area of communication, the role of the adverb alltså is frequently to return the interlocutor to a previously mentioned topic or to summarise the information and deliver it to the interlocutor in a better optimised way. In case of being in the absolute final position in the sentence, alltså also receives the intensifying function along with the connective one.

The explanatory adverb nämligen is used in sentences to describe the cause of the situation which was described in a previous sentence which can only be adjacent to the sentence where the adverb nämligen is used.

The analysis has shown that the connective adverbs in the Swedish language express a wider range of causality than conjunctions. In contrast to conjunctions, they can connect in meaning not only separate sentences, but also larger fragments of text, including ones which are distant from each other. The given adverbs are, as a result, one of the most important means which yield logical cohesion and semantic coherence of the text.