Quoniam, quod, quia: causal connectives in Pliny, Seneca and Vitruvius

The use of quoniam, quod and quia in classical Latin, and, in some cases, in later texts, has been the object of numerous analyses (Fugier 1989, Bolkestein 1991, Mellet 1994 and 1995, Pinkster 2009 and 2010, Kroon 2014). The main opposition stated between quoniam on the one side, and quod and quia on the other, even though not always fully respected (especially in later texts, cf. par exemple Roca Alamà 1997), has been motivated mainly on pragmatic grounds with quoniam introducing disjunct and justificative clauses, contrary to quia and quod. The same contributions also discuss the possible synonymy between quia and quod.
The aim of this paper is to link the analysis of those subordinators with the question of how scientific and technical authors anchor the steps of their reasoning about ‘difficult’ subjects to the knowledge of the readers, in order to allow the latter to follow the development of the text. To do so, I will analyze the use of quoniam, quod and quia in the following three texts: the ninth book of Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the seventh book of Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones, and the second book of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. Written in the span of one century, these texts, which deal with analogous, if not identical, themes (that is, astronomical and meteorological questions), have been annotated morphosyntactically with LASLA (Laboratoire d’analyse statistique des langues anciennes) methods and represent an interesting corpus for the question discussed here. The corpus is composed of about 31000 words, with 33 occurrences of quoniam, about 17 of quod as causal connective, and 43 of quia. The three terms are distributed with statistically different values: Pliny shows a clear preference for quoniam, followed by quia, and has only four occurrences of quod as a causal conjunction, while Seneca uses only the last, and Vitruvius only quia (with two exceptions). This clearly suggests three different ways of grounding the arguments that are presented to the reader.
My presentation will be structured in two parts. First, I will consider whether the general theory on the use of the three connectives quod-quia-quoniam applies to the Vitruvius-Pliny-Seneca corpus, and I will describe the anomalies shown in some sentences, which are surprisingly important, especially in Pliny. The comparison between Vitruvius and Seneca will also shed some light on the employment quod/quia couple in scientific texts. Secondly, I will insert this discussion in a wider framework, that of these authors’ argumentative techniques. I aim to show how the diverse aims of these three works unfold through correspondingly diverse communicative strategies. Such strategies include the exigency to justify one's own observations, with the content of the causal clauses serving to this end as the presupposition accepted by both the writer and his audience. The fact that these three authors consistently employ different connectives to introduce their causal clauses suggests that there are differences in the kind of consensus that they are trying to build with their readers.