Welcome to NoCaCoDa: Nominal Causal Constructions Database

NoCaCoDa is a typological database of nominal causal constructions. Nominal causal constructions are constructions where the causing event is syntactically represented by a noun phrase, as in The woman woke up from [the noise] or The woman can’t fall asleep because of [the mosquitoes]. The database makes it possible to explore the ways in which different nominal causal markers, such as English from and because of in the examples above, are distributed over various causal contexts. As of , the database covers 42 languages, primarily from Northern Eurasia. The data have been collected using a questionnaire containing 54 stimulus sentences. These stimulus sentences capture various semantic subtypes of nominal causal constructions.

How to use NoCaCoDa

You can browse NoCaCoDa by stimulus sentence (e.g., in case you are interested in the ways indirect external causes are encoded across languages) or by language (e.g., in case you are interested in the ways in which the nominal causal meaning is conveyed in a specific language). Besides, you can take an overview of the data in your browser or search the whole database as an extended spreadsheet. In order to properly interpret the tags used in the database, you can consult how to read the data.

How to cite NoCaCoDa

To cite NoCaCoDa as a whole

Say, Sergey, Natalia Logvinova, Elizaveta Zabelina, and Natalia Zaika (eds.). 2022–. NoCaCoDa: Typological database of nominal causal constructions. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, RAS. (Available online at https://nocacoda.info. Accessed on )

Contact details

Please address inquiries about the data or the project at large to Sergey Say (serjozhka /at/ yahoo /dot/ com). If there is a technical issue on the website, please report it here.