CAUSE AND EFFECT AS A LINGUISTIC CATEGORY: LOGICAL-PHILOSOPHICAL, COGNITIVE AND PRAGMATIC FOUNDATIONS FOR STUDYING CAUSAL RELATIONS IN MODERN KARAKALPAK

Causality is usually taught in Karakalpak grammar as one semantic type of the complex sentence: a clause joined to another by a conjunction such as sebebi or sonlıqtan. That description is accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves most of the phenomenon outside the frame. Speakers of Karakalpak express cause and effect through nouns and verbs, case endings, participles and converbs, unmarked sequences of sentences, and inferences that the reader draws without any marker at all. This article develops the theoretical and methodological foundations needed to study that whole range. Drawing on logical-philosophical accounts of causation, Talmy's force dynamics, script and frame theory, discourse coherence research, and the functional-semantic tradition of Russian and Turkic linguistics, it proposes a working definition of the cause-effect relation for Karakalpak and separates causation from five neighbouring relations: temporal sequence, condition, purpose, concession and pretext. It then sets out a two-stage analytical model: a functional-semantic stage that fixes the direction, level, marker, explicitness and field position of each causal unit, and a pragmatic stage that determines its domain (content, epistemic or speech-act), source of subjectivity, factivity and communicative function. Five criteria are proposed for admitting unmarked (implicit) examples into a corpus. The scientific novelty of the study lies in offering the first integrated, multi-level model of causality designed specifically for Karakalpak material. The main conclusion is that causality in Karakalpak is best described not as a clause type but as a centre-periphery field whose units are selected by speakers for communicative ends.