Clause chaining in Turkic

This collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross-linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and distinctive criteria for subordination, as well as typological methods based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause-chaining, conjunctive conjugations, converbial constructions, masdars. Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of clause-linking and subordination, in relation to informa­tional structure, to referential hierarchy, and correlative constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers, verbal inflectional morphology and conjugation systems, which may also interact with informa­tional hierarchy, via the backgrounding effects and lack of illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause-linkage systems and on the interface between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics.

\n Com base nos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Sociolinguística Variacionista (LABOV, 2008 [1972]; 2001), esta pesquisa investiga o emprego de formas verbais subjuntivas e indicativas em três contextos de subordinação orações adverbiais, substantivas (na posição de complemento do verbo da oração principal) e relativas. Os dados foram extraídos de 36 entrevistas sociolinguísticas com paulistanos e 36 entrevistas com ludovicenses, estratificadas de acordo com o sexo/gênero dos informantes, sua faixa etária (18 a 35; 36 a 59; e 60 anos ou mais) e seu nível de escolaridade (médio superior). Examinam-se as variáveis linguísticas e sociais que se correlacionam à ocorrência dessas formas. Entre as linguísticas, incluem-se variáveis como o tempo verbal da oração subordinada; o tipo de subordinador (tais como se e embora, no caso das orações adverbiais); o verbo da oração principal e o tempo verbal da oração principal (no caso das orações substantivas). Propõe-se que, em português, formas subjuntivas e indicativas funcionam como variantes de uma variável apenas nas orações adverbiais, ao passo que, nos outros dois contextos, tais formas se alternam mas não constituem sempre formas de dizer a mesma coisa (LABOV, 1972; 1978). A análise quantitativa dos dados foi feita com o pacote estatístico GoldVarb X (SANKOFF, TAGLIAMONTE, SMITH, 2005). Os resultados indicam que, no geral, é maior a tendência de ocorrência do modo indicativo em São Paulo relativamente a São Luís. Por outro lado, há indício de mudança na fala ludovicense, na direção do indicativo, em orações adverbiais e substantivas.\n

Korean is a language with the verb at the end of a clause/sentence. In chaining several clauses [each consisting of a subject and a verb] in a sentence, a conjunction (e.g., -ko “and then,” -ese “because, and so”) is suffixed to the verb of a non-final clause. Korean has an extensive set of conjunctions that connect to the next clause, expressing temporal, causal, and contrastive relations among others. In this paper, I lay out a developmental trajectory of clause chaining construction in Korean based on longitudinal and cross-sectional data samples, focusing on conjunctive forms and functions as well as morphological and syntactic properties of connected clauses in a sentence. The database comes from longitudinal naturalistic speech data of five children collected regularly over different time periods between 2 and 5 years of age, and from elicited descriptions of short video events from children - aged 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 years - and adults. The results show that, at least from 2 years of age, the Korean children in the sample start connecting clauses using appropriate conjunctions. Within 6 months, they acquire several major conjunctions that express temporal, causal, conditional, and contrastive relations between events. By 4 years of age, the children’s clause chains are quite adult-like in terms of the repertoire of conjunctive forms and functions, and of the morphological and syntactic features of the clauses that connect to the main clause. In particular they learn to express temporal relations that have some disjuncture between events. However, 4-year-olds still lack the ability to appropriately refer to differential subjects of the chained clauses and also to connect multiple clauses in a sentence. The elicitation data reveal that further development in clause chaining occurs over several years – with a milestone at 10 years – and through adulthood, particularly in relation to appropriate referential marking, conjunction frequency, and segmentation of a macro event into sub-events for clause-chaining construction. These developmental processes are presented from a cognitive perspective, in particular with regard to concept of temporal relation, reference specification involving two or more entities, and perceptual saliency of event type.

Reviewed by: The Salish language family: Reconstructing syntax by Paul D. Kroeber M. Dale Kinkade The Salish language family: Reconstructing syntax. By Paul D. Kroeber. (Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians.) Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. xxxi, 461. Cloth $45.00. This book is probably unique among studies of North American Indian languages in its accomplishments, and it is an important work for anyone interested in comparative syntax, those interested in the syntax of American Indian languages, and, above all, anyone studying Salish or other Northwest languages. The subtitle is crucial to knowing what to expect in general although it promises more than is actually presented (not surprisingly, given the huge array of possible syntactic issues in any language); what Kroeber actually does is compare a limited number of syntactic features of Salish languages, suggest reconstructions of them, and explain how they must have developed in various parts of the family. All this was no mean feat; Salish is one of the largest language families in North America (with 23 languages), and availability of pertinent data is very uneven. To make his job harder, K chose some of the most complex types of constructions that languages have to offer: complement and adverbial clauses, relative clauses, and extraction. The volume begins with prefatory remarks on the sources he uses and how he has normalized transcriptions, essential lists of abbreviations, and a map showing the location of Salish and neighboring languages. Ch. 1 (1–78) provides a background for the rest of the book: the phonological inventory of Proto-Salish and many of its pertinent developments into modern Salish languages, then quick overviews of morphological and clausal structures that are necessary for an understanding of the body of the volume. Chs. 2 and 3 (79–251) look at complement and adverbial clauses; Chs. 4–6 (252–363) examine relative clauses, Ch. 7 (364–411) looks briefly at various fronting constructions, and Ch. 8 (412–32) speculates on possible influences from neighboring non-Salish languages. Other major syntactic issues are not treated at all, not bearing significantly on his major themes; thus there is nothing about compounding, lexical suffixes, causatives, or applicatives, all of which were found in Proto-Salish and have important syntactic ramifications in all modern languages of the family. Very briefly, K’s findings are the following: (1) ‘Proto-Salish must have had a conjunctive inflectional paradigm of some sort’ (246), and this conjunctive ‘presumably marked conditional clauses’ (246), although how many varieties of conditional and adverbial clauses is indeterminate. (2) ‘Propositional nominalization can be assumed to have been used in most complement clauses other than interrogative ones’ (249). (3) ‘Relativization of subjects and objects presumably was marked not by any special overt inflection distinct from that of main clauses, but (if at all) merely by omission of subject or object pronominal morphology from the predicate complex’ (307). He finds it difficult to be sure how relativized objects or possessors were treated; ‘subject-centered clauses followed the present-day Bella Coola pattern’ (307); relativized oblique objects used nominalization by means of a prefixed /s-/. The reader who pays close attention may observe a bias toward some Salish languages and a neglect of others. This was inevitable, given the availability of data. Just over 49% of K’s examples are from the Interior branch of Salish, 28% from the three northern languages of this branch alone. Forty percent are from the Central Salish branch; Tillamook and Bella Coola, [End Page 573] isolates within the family, are adequately represented. However, the Tsamosan branch, comprising four languages, is represented by Upper Chehalis alone, and only 2.5% of the examples come from that language. The reasons for this imbalance are simple: K himself worked on these very issues in his Thompson fieldwork but largely on other matters when he earlier worked on Sliammon (Central Salish). Other syntacticians have worked on the other two Northern Interior languages, on Okanagan (Southern Interior), and on Halkomelem (Central Salish) and on Bella Coola. K carefully went through the manuscript texts in Tillamook that had been collected by Franz Boas in 1890 and May Edel in 1931. I am greatly impressed with what...

This unique three-volume 2007 survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and diexis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each new concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and fieldworkers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Most of the chapters in the second edition are substantially revised or completely new - some on topics not covered by the first edition. Volume II covers co-ordination, complementation, noun phrase structure, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, discourse structure, and sentences as combinations of clauses.

The research aims to explore the etymology and semantic field of the zoonym “cow” in the linguocultural contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families. The article analyzes the origin of the word “cow” in Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, identifying its core and additional meanings, commonalities and specific features. This analysis makes it possible to determine the national characteristics in the expression of knowledge about people, animals, and the world in mythological and religious beliefs by the native speakers. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the zoonym “cow” not only as a linguistic object, but also as a cultural phenomenon intertwined with history, mythology, religion, and human lifestyle. This zoonym is studied for the first time in a comparative aspect using data from Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, with the aim of identifying, analyzing, and describing national cultural features, similarities, and differences. As a result, the study proves that the etymology and semantics of the word “cow” in the contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families display shared roots, dating back to a distant past, and indicate profound connections between the peoples. Despite some differences among the peoples who speak Slavic and Turkic languages, such as national specificity of worldview, varying living conditions, traditions, history, and religion, the words designating the cow in various linguocultures are part of a unified history, connected to the use of this animal in human life.

In Turkish and Kyrgyz languages with two voices (VC and CV), and the meaning parallels of the common root verbs in Muqaddimat al-Edab (=MKE) have been studied. In Turkish and Kyrgyz languages common root verbs with two voices were scanned for the common root verbs discussed, and then their meaning parallels were examined by comparing them with MKE. In the study, the meanings of common root verbs are given, while the meaning of MKE, the sentence in the text and its transfer to modern Turkish are also given. Then Kyrgyz and Turkish languages are shown only if there is a parallel or close meaning. Unrelated meanings were not added to the study. By paying attention to the fact that the study is at a certain limit, some determinations have been made about the semantic properties of common root verbs in two languages. In order to study the semantic status of the related words, “Muqaddimat al-Adab (1993)”, “Kyrgyz Language Dictionary I-II (2011) and “Turkish Dictionary (2011)” were taken as the basis.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates adverbial relative clauses in world Englishes, in particular relative clauses expressing place (the place where), time (the time when), manner (the way in which) and reason (the reason why). Using data from the ICE corpora, it compares the varieties spoken in India, Hong‐Kong and Singapore. In particular we consider: (i) the meaning expressed by the relative clause; (ii) the nominal antecedent, both its meaning and form; and (iii) the relative word used to introduce the relative clause (adverbial relative word, wh‐ pronoun, that and zero). An examination of these issues reveals distinguishing features in the distribution of relative words that are related to the different constructions, to the specific postcolonial varieties that have been developed in the different countries and, finally, to the interaction between the superstrate and the different substrate languages.

This paper investigates apparent locality violations in Kazakh (Turkic) relative clauses. The empirical starting point of this study is the configuration where the genitive-marked relative clause subject establishes agreement with the noun phrase modified by the relative clause, constituting an ostensibly non-local Agree relation, a phenomenon that is common among Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and Finno-Ugric languages. Contra previous proposals arguing that the subject is situated inside a defective relative clause and it gets case from the D head of the modified noun phrase, this paper proposes a novel analysis of this phenomenon: the genitive phrase is base-generated in the possessor position and it controls a PRO subject in the relative clause. After establishing that the genitive “subjects” are relative clause-external, the paper turns to extraction out of the relative clause: RC constituents can undergo intermediate scrambling to the left of the genitive-marked phrase. This is unexpected under the assumption that relative clauses are strong islands for extraction. The paper suggests that this type of RC allows extraction because it is not an adjunct.

A select set of English nouns can head adverbial NPs – NPs that can act as adverbs without being preceded by a preposition. These ‘adverbial nouns’ also can be modified by prepositionless adverbial non-wh relative clauses. An analysis is presented in a categorial grammar framework, employing a conjunctive type structure to describe the behavior of adverbial nouns. It is suggested that adverbial nouns select non-wh adverbial relative clauses as complements; lexical rules are written to allow such selection. Finally, some remaining issues are surveyed concerning adverbial nouns in particular and conjunctive categories in general.

The chapter deals with complex constructions in the Transeurasian languages, including complement, relative, and adverbial clauses, as well as paratactic constructions. The dominant strategy of expressing subordinate clauses across the Transeurasian language families is the “deranking” strategy relying on nonfinite forms such as participles and converbs, which are discussed in considerable detail. Given the vast domain, the chapter focuses on convergent tendencies across the Transeurasian languages, resulting from either typological similarities, areal convergence, or possibly shared “drift,” indicative of a remote genealogical relation, as has been suggested in the literature. Accounting for and distinguishing among these different factors presents a considerable challenge for Transeurasian studies. In this chapter one case of convergent behavior in the domain of internally headed relative clauses is presented in detail, and the conclusion reached that both independent developments and language contact are responsible for the convergencies in this domain.

Dependent clauses are one of the prominent examples illustrating the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. Three types of dependent clauses have usually been distinguished in a broader sense: (i) complement clauses, (ii) adverbial clauses, and (iii) correlative or relative clauses. The question of whether these three types can be reduced to a single abstract structure has inspired several fruitful lines of research, resulting in a mass of new empirical findings and leading to novel results. For example, many authors have proposed to analyze different types of dependent clauses as correlative/relative clauses (see Arsenijevic 2009, Bhatt & Pancheva 2006, Caponigro & Polinsky 2011, Geis 1970, Haegeman 2012, Kayne 2014, Krapova 2010, Kratzer 2006, Moulton 2009, 2015, among many others). This special issue of the Historical Syntax section of Language, entitled New insights into the syntax and semantics of complementation, focuses in particular on the diachronic syntax and semantics of dependent clauses and shows to what extent complement, adverbial, and relative/correla- tive clauses may be related to each other.

Based on the definition of the subjunctive as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category modality the book presents the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. It covers the periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE), and it considers all contruction types in which the subjunctive is attested, namely main clauses, noun clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. Besides numerically substantiating the well-known hypothesis that the simplification of the verbal syntagm led to a long-term frequency decrease of the subjunctive, it explores the factors which governed its competition with other verbal expressions. The data used for the analysis come from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts; they comprise nearly half a million words in 91 files. Their analysis was carried out by close reading, and the results of the analysis were processed with the statistical program SPSS. This combined quantitative-qualitative method offers new insights into the research landscape of English subjunctive use and into the fields of historical English linguistics and corpus linguistics.

The goal of this paper is to give a typological overview of the main characteristics of restrictive relative clauses in Gavar. The analysis is based on 572 examples of relative clauses taken from a corpus of 59 interlinearised texts, elicited examples and example sentence provided for lexical items. It is observed that relative clauses in Gavar are externally headed, with the head noun, when present, preceding the relative clause. Headless relative clauses are also possible. The relative clause begins with a relative marker. Subject relative clauses are marked with the relative marker ma whose tone varies between high and low. Non-subject relative clauses are marked with relative marker ndə́ (ná) which always carries a high tone. There is no restriction on the grammatical roles that can be relativised. Subject, direct and indirect object, oblique, genitive and object of comparison relative clauses are all possible. The gap strategy is used to encode NPrel within a subject relative clause. A resumptive pronoun is frequently but not always used to encode NPrel within a non-subject relative clause. Gavar does not have special ‘relative’ tense/aspect marking, but perfective marking on the verb is disallowed in relative clauses. The existential status of the head noun is coded by the use versus the absence of a post-relative demonstrative. Subject relative clauses with an adjectival predicate form the basis of the comparative construction in Gavar. Non-subject relative clause constructions have developed into various types of adverbial clauses.

This paper investigates Turkish subordinate constructions in 201 fictional narratives told by 102 bilingual Turkish-Swedish children (age 4 to 7), growing up in Sweden with Turkish as a heritage language. All narratives were elicited with the picture sequences of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012). We analyze the characteristics of the Turkish relative, complement and adverbial clauses in the children’s narratives and in their responses to story comprehension questions from quantitative and qualitative points of view. The children produce a wide variety of subordinate constructions, going beyond what is typically reported for Turkish heritage language acquisition elsewhere. In the cross-sectional data sampled, there is considerable individual variation concerning subordination, but relatively little development from age 4 to 7, as some of the youngest children already master Turkish nonfinite subordination, and older children do not necessarily use subordination more frequently or in more adultlike ways than younger ones. Certain types of subordination are rare (e.g. relativization) or even absent in the data (complementation with object control). Other types of subordinate constructions are very frequent and nearly always conform to standard adult Turkish (e.g. complementation with subject control; adverbialization with simple converbs). However, the precise morphological form and function of subjunctors in causal and purposive adverbial clauses (an aspect rarely discussed in the Turkish acquisition literature) is not yet mastered by the oldest children in the sample (age 7). In general, the Turkish-Swedish data point to relatively successful and early acquisition of nonfinite subordination morphology, unlike what has been reported by a number of earlier studies of children acquiring Turkish in a bilingual and/or heritage language context in other countries (e.g. Boeschoten, 1990; Pfaff, 1991, 1993; Aarssen 2001; Herkenrath & Karakoç, 2002; Rehbein & Herkenrath, 2015). Our finding that bilingual children acquiring Turkish are able to produce much more complex sentences than originally claimed in the literature is suggested to be due to differences in setting, sampling and data elicitation.