This book is a detailed study of the discourse semantic properties of causal connectives and their presuppositions. The interpretation process of connectives like although and because, and their Dutch counterparts, will be followed from the recognition of subtle meaning differences of a connective used in different contexts, an explanation for these differences in terms of presuppositions, an analysis of the way these presuppositions manipulate lexical knowledge to infer causal coherence relations and the effect of these coherence relations on antecedents of propositional anaphors in discourse structure.

Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Causal and contrastive relations 3. Presuppositions for causal connectives 4. Inference and enforcement 5. Causality in discourse structure 6. Conclusion