Relations that are seldom or never signaled

[Viatscheslav Iatsko]

Bill Mann resumed the discussion of relations that are not signaled. The
impression is that his viewpoint on the problem is based on the dichotomy of
"signaled-not signaled". I'd like to draw his and other RST-LISTers'
attention to the fact that there can be a third variant: contradiction
between the meaning of the connective word (or phrase) and the nature of
logical relation between parts of discourse. Consider the following example.
a. Abends, wenn es sich m*de gearbeitet hatte, kam es in kein Bett, sondern
mu*te sich neben den Herd in die Asche legen. b.Und weil es darum immer
staubig und schmutzig aussah, nannten sie es Aschenputtel.
(b) contains the causative-consecutive adverb weil, nevertheless, the
judgements expressed by the sentence cannot be correlated with the major
premise of syllogism, cf.: ?Everybody who looks dusty and dirty is called
Cinderella. In spite of the use of a causative-consecutive adverb, (b)
expresses a diachronic relation denoting temporal succession of states of a
person. Actually, causative-consecutive adverb weil in this sentence loses
its lexical meaning and is used as a synonym of the adverbs with temporal
meaning, cf.: First she looked dusty and dirty, and then she was called
Cinderella. Thus, the use of weil contradicts the nature of logical relation
between judgements expressed by (b). The nature of this contradiction is
determined by the policemy of connective words, which was mentioned by one
of the participants of the discussion. Perhaps this fact should be taken
into account while counting and analyzing rates of signaling.
Slava