Causal clauses with because, since, as and for display differing syntactic properties. The study demonstrates that these differences correspond with certain meanings of reason and cause specified in the course of the book. To this end the syntactic analyses are supplemented by speech act-theoretical and language-analytic studies; also, philosophical theories and models of the conceptual field 'causality - explanation - substantiation' are drawn on. The LOB corpus provides the material for examples and underlies the text-typological inquiry into the occurrence of the causal clauses in question.
