Mingrelian and Laz

2001

Beginning with Geis (1970), several authors have provided syntactic, semantic, and etymological arguments for analyzing adverbial clauses as free relatives, involving movement of an (often null) operator (see Haegeman 2010 for a review). This paper provides morphological evidence for this view while arguing for separate extraction sites for the moved elements in temporal and conditional clauses. The Bantu language Akɔɔse (Hedinger 2008) exhibits wh-agreement (see Reintges, LeSourd, & Chung 2006 for a typological profile); that is, it marks its verbs with respect to whether an element has been extracted to the left periphery. The extraction of subjects is marked differently on the verb than the extraction of non-subjects. This extraction marking occurs not only in canonical wh-movement contexts (Chomsky 1977), such as constituent questions, relative clauses, cleft questions, and topicalization, but also in temporal and conditional adverbial clauses, suggesting that a free relative analysis of these clauses is warranted. Verbs in central temporal clauses take the non-subject extraction morphology, while verbs in central conditional clauses show the morphology found in subject extraction contexts. As would be expected from Haegeman's (2007) claim that peripheral adverbial clauses do not involve movement, these clauses show no extraction morphology in Akɔɔse. In order to probe the question of where the relativizing operators in central temporal and conditional clauses originate, this paper offers a novel syntactic account for the morphological patterns found in Akɔɔse wh-agreement. According to this account, the temporal operator must originate within the VP layer, while the locus of extraction for the operator involved in central conditional clauses must be higher.

Linguistic Variation Yearbook, 2004

This paper presents cross-linguistic arguments for distinguishing between two types ofwh-adverbials: causalhow, causalwhy, and epistemicwhypattern together in taking an IP scope, functioning as operators, whereas methodhow, mannerhow, and purposewhypattern together in taking a VP scope, functioning as predicates of underlying events. For the former group, there is always a cause-effect relation underpinning their syntactic distributions across languages, which is semantically realized as a causative predicate taking two events as its arguments, i.e., a cause event and an effect event. In a causal question, it is the cause event that is bound by the question operator; in a resultative question, the effect event is bound instead. For the latter group, they surface as conjuncts of main predicates in Tsou, which in turn argues for a neo-Davidsonian treatment of adjunct association in syntax (Parsons 1990). The fact that a conjunctivehowcan be construed as either a manner/method question...

Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten, Natalia Levshina, Susanne Maria Michaelis and Ilja A. Seržant (eds.), Explanation in Linguistic Typology: Diachronic Sources, Functional Motivations and the Nature of the Evidence. Leipzig: Language Science Press., 2019

In the historical literature it is commonly assumed that subordinate clauses are derived from paratactic sentences. However, while this assumption is not implausible for certain types of postposed adverbial clauses, there is no obvious connection between preposed adverbial clauses and parataxis. This paper investigates the diachronic development of preposed adverbial clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. Drawing on data from a typological and diachronic database, it is shown that preposed adverbial clauses evolve from various diachronic sources that are semantically and structurally similar to the target construction (e.g. adpositional phrases, pre- and postnominal relative clauses, juxtaposed sentences). Considering the factors behind these developments, the paper argues that while the occurrence of preposed adverbial clauses can be explained by general cognitive processes of language use, the internal structure of preposed adverbial clauses, notably the position of the subordinator, is primarily determined by grammaticalization.

Language, 2001

Adverbial sentences, 2023

After questioning the traditional category "adverbial clause," which, unlike "complement clause" and "relative clause," is not syntactically de��ned, the inventory of the formal markers of this category is presented, which encompasses connectives; their possible correlatives in the main clause; and the verbal categories ��niteness, mood, aspect, and tense. Subsequently, the verbal categories are examined in more detail by illustrating the interplay of aspect and tense in expressing taxis relations and the role of dedicated TAM markers in conditional clauses. Russian conditional clauses exhibit a particular cluster of markers including inverted word order, mood, and asyndetic linkage. On a more general level, the cross-linguistic competition of ��nite and in��nitival constructions is illustrated in the subsequent section. The last section explores the semantic links between conditional, causal, consecutive, concessive, and purpose clauses; the di�ferent subtypes of temporal relations and comparisons; and the varying degree of polysemy and semantic specialization of connectives.

English Language & Linguistics, 1998

Language Sciences, 2015

English Language and Linguistics, 2013