Studying the Semantic Context of two Dutch Causal Connectives

We aim to study the difference of usage between two causal connectives in their semantic context. We present an ongoing study of two Dutch backward causal connectives omdat and want. Previous linguistic research has shown that causal constructions with want are more subjective and often express an opinion. Our hypothesis is that the left and right context surrounding the connectives are more semantically similar in sentences with omdat than sentences with want. To test this hypothesis we apply two techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and n-gram overlap. We show that both methods indeed indicate a substantial difference between the two connectives but opposite to what we had expected.