Temporal Clauses

Typological studies have tended to take for granted the default interpretation for English and imposed 'simultaneity' as the basic meaning of when-clauses for all languages. This in opposition to the approach taken in reference grammars, which generally report temporal linkage markers like when as encoding one or several meanings. Data from languages other than English show that comparative studies should also be open to the possibility that when-clauses do not always, or only, denote simultaneity. To support this claim and argue against the default interpretation of simultaneity, in this study I explore the range of temporal meanings of when-clauses across languages and provide evidence from Spanish and Yaqui corpora. Unlike English, corpus-based studies show that Spanish equivalent cuando-clauses equally introduce simultaneous and sequential readings, while Yaqui o-/kai-clauses predominantly express sequential meanings. Furthermore, a convenience sample of 28 unrelated languages reveals that, if there is a when-clause in a language, it can locate the event of the adverbial clause earlier, later, or around the same time as the main clause. The analysis of the semantic side of when-clauses demonstrates that there are language-specific tendencies regarding their temporal meanings. On these grounds, I propose that a better understanding of when-clauses can be arrived at by classifying them as 'unspecific' temporal clauses. This categorization would motivate a richer analysis of new data and a systematic comparison between unspecific, simultaneous and sequential clauses. Finally, I advance a four-way classification regarding general vs. specific markers, and the temporal relations they encode, two of which account for most languages analyzed.

In Yaqui, purpose, reason and temporal relations are expressed by multiple syntactic structures. The aim of this paper is to explore whether Yaqui syntactic linkages are compatible (or not) with the cross-linguistic predictions made by the Interclausal semantic relations hierarchy. This Hierarchy (Van Valin 2005: 209) predicts a scale where purpose outranks reason and reason outranks temporally ordered events. However, Yaqui does not conform to the expected rankings. In this language, purpose relations make use of the tightest syntactic linkages, while reason relations are expressed by the loosest syntactic structure. However, in terms of syntactic bonding and semantic integration, simultaneous and sequential temporal expressions are placed right in the middle of purpose and reason.

Beginning with Geis (1970), several authors have provided syntactic, semantic, and etymological arguments for a derivation of adverbial (subordinate) clauses that involves movement of an (often null) operator (see Haegeman 2010a 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 typology); 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. 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.

This paper offers a syntactic account for the patterns in Akɔɔse wh-agreement morphology and uses this account to refine our knowledge of the extraction sites for the operators in central temporal and conditional clauses, as well as to argue that peripheral adverbial clauses do not involve extraction (supporting Haegeman 2007).

Beginning with Geis (1970), several authors have provided syntactic, semantic, and etymological arguments for a derivation of adverbial (subordinate) clauses that involves movement of an (often null) operator (see Haegeman 2010a 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 typology); that is, it marks its verbs with respect to whether an element has been extracted to the left periphery. 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.

Crucially, Akɔɔse wh-agreement encodes whether the extracted element originated above or below v. The distribution of wh-agreement morphology shows that the operator in central conditional clauses is extracted from a position above v (supporting Haegeman's (2010b) claim), the moved element in central temporal clauses originates below v (contra suggestions by Demirdache & Uribe-Extebarria (2004) and Haegeman (2007)), and there is no extraction in peripheral adverbial clauses (as argued in Haegeman 2007).

Wh-agreement provides compelling evidence for a movement analysis for both temporal and conditional central adverbial clauses. Due to its sensitivity to height of extraction, Akɔɔse lends insight into the question of where the moved elements originate, unlike languages like Irish (McCloskey 2001) where wh-agreement only registers the presence of movement.

This paper concerns the converb forms expressing Simultaneity in Izhma Komi, Northern Khanty and Moksha belonging to the Finno-Ugric group of languages. The existing typological classifications of temporal relations and simultaneity relations in particular either are not detailed enough or lack rigorous criteria and thus appear not to be sufficient for understanding the usage and the distribution of temporal converbs. The study attempts at building a more detailed typological classification of Simultaneity functions which accounts for the data of the languages under consideration. The analyzed parameters of variation include the viewpoint aspect of the events, clause modification type, givenness of the conveyed information and the pragmatic type of the predicate. Special attention is paid to the discourse-pragmatic properties of the forms which bring new insights into the discussion.

В докладе предлагается и иллюстрируется понятие синтаксического дублирования. Оно применяется к случаям, когда глагол в подчинённой клаузе копирует форму глагола из  главной клаузы. При этом сама копируемая форма может быть разной, что отличает дублирование от стандартных случаев управления. Дублирование усматривается в конструкциях с фазовыми глаголами, трёхчастных конструкциях со временным придаточным и сравнительных конструкциях.

This paper explores two non-finite temporal adverbial constructions V-m/t-+ măr and V-t-+ sa in Kazym dialect of Khanty spoken in the Kazym village of Khanty-Mansi autonomous region in Russia. V-t-+ sa construction expresses the meaning of point simultaneity ('when'), whereas V-m/t-+ măr construction is mainly used in the meaning of interval simultaneity ('while'). Yet, a more detailed look at these constructions reveals an additional discourse-level contrast in direct accessibility of the main event. V-t-+ sa describes the simultaneously occurring events directly attested by the Speaker. In turn, the use of V-m/t-+ măr is preferred in evidential, modal and other subjective contexts where the presence of the main event is subject to the Speaker's inference, hearsay, conjecture or imagination. Although the Speaker's point of view is the default, there are certain contexts in which the perspective switches to some other discourse participant. The behavior of V-m/t-+ măr and V-t-+ sa is modelled in the cognitive framework of Mental Spaces Theory.

The article is focused on Russian constructions with zero copulas. I test the zero copulas for compatibility with different syntactic contexts to find out whether their syntactic behavior differs significantly from that of lexical verbs. The diagnostics used in the paper include occurrence in relative and temporal clauses, compatibility with particles, and adverbials / adverbial constructions. The differences between the zero copulas and lexical verbs turn out to be of two types: a copula allows some uses, prohibited for lexical verbs, and, in contrast, impossible in other constructions where lexical verbs can participate. The differences are due to two properties of copulas: (1) lack of morphologically-marked categories and (2) lack of a lexical stem. Different types of copulas as distinguished by Testelets (2008) behave differently in syntactic tests, but the picture cannot be reduced to Testelets' two classes of copulas (binominative and non-binominative ones).

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.

Se lo studio della sintassi può apparire ai non appassionati arida materia, il presente volume è volto a sfatare questa communis opinio. Vi sono raccolti sette saggi che mettono in luce svariati aspetti della frase complessa: dalla concitata “sintassi della guerra” delle cronache trecentesche alla lingua delle infuocate prediche del Savonarola, dal "cum inversum" stilema di apparizioni e visioni, all’idea del mondo rovesciato espressa nelle frasi concessive. Apparentemente eterogenei per gli argomenti linguistici affrontati, i sette capitoli che compongono il libro sono in realtà accomunati dalla ricca tipologia testuale su cui l’analisi è fondata (testi di prosa d’arte come la Vita Nova o il Decameron, ma anche testi di prosa media e di carattere pratico, come le lettere e i volgarizzamenti)
e dalle metodologie d'indagine, che adottano accanto ai principi della linguistica storica prospettive e procedure di analisi moderne.

Введение. Работа посвящена проблеме функционирования и интерпретации таксисных форм с семантикой одновременности в языках финно-угорской группы. Существующие описания форм преимущественно затрагивают формальную сторону вопроса, в то время как семантические и прагматические свойства, лежащие в основе их конкуренции, до сих пор не получали достаточного освещения. Цель статьи состоит в семантически и прагматически ориентированном описании форм и уточнении имеющихся типологических классификаций. Предметом исследования являются формы деепричастий в трех языках: мокшанском, коми-зырянском и хантыйском. Результаты могут быть использованы при составлении учебных пособий по грамматической семантике, а также в полевых исследованиях.
Материалы и методы. Анализ форм проведен на материале данных, полученных методом анкетного опроса носителей в с. Лесное Цибаево и Лесное Ардашево Республики Мордовия (2013–2015 гг.) и с. Мужи, Восяхово, Овгорт Ямало-Ненецкого автономного округа (2016, 2017 гг.).
Результаты исследования и их обсуждение. Дается краткая семантическая характеристика форм, затем последовательно рассматривается их употребление по трем типологически релевантным параметрам: видовому ракурсу ситуаций, прагматическому включению ситуаций и прагматическому статусу зависимой ситуации. На основе распределения форм по указанным параметрам выделяются три типа форм одновременности: нестрогой стандартной одновременности, строгой стандартной одновременности и сопровождающего обстоятельства.
Заключение. Рассмотренный материал деепричастий с семантикой одновременности показывает, что выделяемые параметры (видового ракурса ситуаций, прагматического включения и прагматического статуса зависимой ситуации) позволяют получить более ясную картину функционирования и дистрибуции подобных форм в контексте изучения финно-угорских языков и типологии.

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clause...

Korean temporal adverbial clauses have been known to appear in a fixed position in a sentence in that they precede the main clause and the topic overall has received little attention in literature. However, it has been noted in literature that in English the positions of temporal adverbial clauses can vary and their occurrences in uniconic positions may be associated with particular pragmatic functions. Noting this kind observation in English, this paper aims to explore grammatical properties of the Korean-ceney 'before' and hwuey/-nase 'after' temporal adverbial clauses in real-life uses and discuss iconicity involved in them. In doing so, this paper makes use of authentic corpus data available online. The findings show that both-ceney 'before' and-hwuey/-nase 'after' temporal adverbial clauses behave the same in that they occur most frequently in the initial position but they show different behavior in some respects such as preferences in non-initial positions, NPI licensing, and preferences with negative main clauses. The findings also indicate that in each of the two temporal adverbial clauses, the different registers (spoken vs. written) play a role in triggering some different grammatical properties. The present study, therefore, allows us to have a better understanding of authentic uses of the temporal adverbial clauses that previous literature has missed out.

The paper aims to further advance the line of research where all uses of the Russian subordinator poka are given a unified semantics, and all constructions involving it are assumed to be fully compositional. I focus on several further issues, viz. whether it is simultaneity or precedence that lies in the core of the meaning of poka; whether and how argument and modifier poka-clauses differ in terms of temporal reference; the prima facie surprising aspectual behaviour of certain verbs in poka-clauses; and the meaning of the construction do tex por, poka, lit. ‘up to the point while / until’.

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.

Estudios tipológicos previos han observado que las cláusulas temporales, a diferencia de otras cláusulas adverbiales, pueden aparecer antes o después de la cláusula principal y esa variación se observa entre lenguas y en una misma lengua. Para el caso del español, varios estudios han sugerido que las cláusulas temporales tienden a ocupar la posición inicial. En este trabajo extendemos las premisas de los estudios tipológicos al análisis de las cláusulas temporales que se introducen con cuando. En datos de uso encontramos que la posición antepuesta es la preferida en lengua oral, pero ambas posiciones son igualmente comunes en lengua escrita. Exploramos algunas motivaciones semánticas, sintácticas y pragmáticas que, en conjunto, pueden influir en esa variación de orden: la naturaleza semántica de cuando, iconicidad de secuencia, longitud y complejidad sintáctica, así como progresión pragmática. Abstract Previous typological studies have shown that temporal clauses, unlike other adverbial clauses, can occur before or after the main clause, and this order variation has been observed across languages and within the same language. In the case of Spanish, some studies have found that temporal clauses tend to occur at the beginning of the clause. In this paper, we extend the assumptions of typological studies into the analysis of temporal clauses introduced by cuando 'when'. Based in used data, we found that the initial position is preferred in oral data, while both positions are equally common in writing data. We examine some semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic motivations that, together, may explain this order variation: the semantic nature of cuando, sequential iconicity, length, and syntactic complexity, as well as pragmatic order.