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Languages of the sample
Source publication
Studies on individual Amazonian languages have shown that these languages can contribute to informing and refining our theories of counterfactual conditional constructions. Still missing, however, is an attempt at exploring this complex sentence construction across different genetic units of the Amazonia in a single study. The paper explores counte...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... this is primarily an explorative study that seeks to characterize a type of construction traditionally neglected in the study of Amazonian languages, we tried to include languages from each of the families found in the Amazonia. Because existing materials differ tremendously in their delicacy and completeness with respect to the description of counterfactual constructions, the present study takes into account a sample of 24 languages belonging to 15 different language families listed in Table 1. Besides grammatical information on counterfactual conditionals, the source also had to contain a detailed description of TAM markers. ...Context 2
... of the present study. Constructing a sample of this type means, in its simplest form, picking one language from every family found in the Amazonia. Based on this, an attempt was made to find one language from each family for which the available literature gives sufficient information on the grammar of counterfactual conditional constructions . It was possible to find sufficient information on 24 languages, as is shown in Table 1. Languages from almost all Amazonian language families and isolates are represented. Furthermore, it is important to mention that linguistic fieldworkers on many languages of the sample have also been consulted to confirm certain analyses of the data and/or discuss alternative analyses. By and large, this method of data collection has ...Citations
It has been shown that linguistic features of main and dependent clauses in complex sentence constructions may show different degrees of association strength giving rise to a number of cross-clausal associations. While this domain has been explored for the most part in corpus-based studies in individual languages, it has received little attention from a typological perspective. The present study makes inroads into this territory by exploring cross-clausal associations of one complex sentence construction in typological perspective: Counterfactual conditionals (e.g., if you had gone, you would have seen her ). In particular, special attention is paid to the interaction of clause-linkage patterns, TAM markers, iconicity of sequence, and ‘but’ clauses in counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 131 languages. By using a hierarchical configural frequency analysis, we identify a number of preferred and dispreferred cross-clausal associations in counterfactual conditionals that we explain from a functional perspective.
