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A cross-linguistic analysis of cross-clausal associations: Counterfactual conditionals
Abstract
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.
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The present paper investigates if not for - if it weren’t/wasn’t for constructions in American English based on the analysis of more than 2,100 constructions extracted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English ( coca ). In analyzing these constructions, we focus on significant interdependencies between the slots of the protasis (i.e. animacy of the referent of the np ) and apodosis (i.e. semantics of the verb lemma) and how these cross-clausal associations interact with other linguistic variables, such as the polarity of the apodosis. We apply a new multivariate extension of collostructional analysis that combines distinctive and (co-varying) collexeme analysis via a hierarchical configural frequency analysis. This allows the analyst to identify associations not just of one slot to a construction or one slot to one other slot in one construction, but to include other features to identify (i) which constructions are preferred by which fillers in, now, one or more slots of one construction and (ii) which constructions are preferred by which (combinations) of one or more fillers.
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 counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 24 Amazonian languages. Special attention is paid to the range of TAM markers and clause-linking devices used in counterfactual conditionals in the Amazonian languages in the sample. As for TAM markers, it is shown that protases tend to be unmarked (they do not occur with any TAM values), and apodoses tend to occur with irrealis or frustrative marking. As for clause-linking devices, it is shown that most Amazonian languages in the sample contain counterfactual conditionals occurring with non-specialized clause-linking devices. This means that the distinction between counterfactual conditionals and other types of conditionals (e.g., real/generic) is not grammaticalized in clause-linking devices. Instead, the counterfactual conditional meaning resides in the combination of specific TAM markers. The paper also pays close attention to the distribution of TAM markers and clause-linking devices in counterfactual conditional constructions in the Vaupés. In particular, special attention is paid to how Tariana counterfactual conditional construction have been shaped by Tucanoan languages through language contact.
Kotoko is a Chadic language spoken in Cameroon, in the region just south of Lake Chad. Based on an analysis of a corpus of texts with helpful input from a mother tongue speaker of the language, this paper presents the forms and functions of conditional constructions. Like other Chadic languages (Frajzyngier 1996: 313, 327), conditionals are formally indistinguishable from certain types of temporal constructions. However, unlike other Chadic languages (e.g. Hausa, Baraïn, Lamang, Miya, Goemai, Buwal), Makary Kotoko has no overt marker for the protasis comparable to ‘if’ in English. Instead, the protasis and apodosis are joined by the marker aro ‘then’ which is semantically linked to the apodosis, but is often prosodically realized at the end of the protasis. Conditional constructions are categorized by their semantics based on classifications by Taylor (1997) and Thompson, Longacre & Hwang (2007), and the function of conditional constructions within discourse is explored.
This dissertation provides a description of Hakhun Tangsa. Hakhun Tangsa is one of around eighty ethnic and linguistic communities called Tangsa or Tangshang. Hakhuns live mostly in Arunachal Pradesh, India, and in Sagaing Division, Myanmar. The number of speakers is estimated at around ten thousand. Hakhun is a Tibeto-Burman language, and it forms a subgroup with Nocte, Wancho, Phom, Konyak, Chang, and Khiamngan called Konyak or Northern Naga.
Hakhun is a tonal language with twenty-two consonants, six vowels, and a simple syllable structure. Open word classes include Nouns and Verbs; property concept terms form a subclass of verbs. Noun roots are mostly monosyllabic, and most multisyllabic nouns are compounds. Nominal morphology includes prossessive prefixes and a set of semantically specific suffixes. Case is coded by postpositions.
Verb roots are also mostly monosyllabic. A few verbs have suppletive stems. Verb serialization is common, and expresses complex events like resultative and sequential. A few grammaticalized verbs/elements contribute abstract meanings like phase, associated motion, causative, benefactive, etc. Typical verbal categories are expressed by independent particles. The most extensive and grammatically obligatory set consists of single syllable particles called operators, which express verbal categories like tense, mood, deixis, negation, inverse, and argument indexation. The typical argument indexation pattern is hierarchical. Deviations from this pattern is used to express certain pragmatic effects like affectedness and politeness.
Non-verbal clauses may take overt copulas depending on tense and polarity. Most semantic distinctions, such as equation, property-concepts, quantification, simulation, and location are expressed by the nominal strategy. Existential and possession are expressed by a distinct strategy. Typical verbal clauses include intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive; less typical ones include weather condition, sensation-emotion, reflexive, reciprocal, and ‘need’ constructions. Person-based split-ergativity is seen in case marking, where first and second person singular arguments follow accusative, and the rest ergative alignment. Accusative alignment is also found in argument indexation in non-final clauses. The object alignment is indirective in case marking.
Complement clauses include sentence-like, non-finite, and infinitive complement clauses. Adverbial clauses include various kinds of temporal clauses, temporal/conditional clauses, counterfactual, concessive, purpose, and substitutive clauses. Clause chaining (medial-final) is prevalent. Independent sentences are linked through tail-head linking and through connectives.
Cognitive linguists and psychologists have often argued that language is best understood as an association network; however, while the network view of language has had a significant impact on the study of morphology and lexical semantics, it is only recently that researchers have taken an explicit network approach to the study of syntax. This innovative study presents a dynamic
network model of grammar in which all aspects of linguistic structure, including core concepts of syntax (e.g., phrase structure, word classes, grammatical relations), are analyzed in terms of associative connections between different types of linguistic elements. These associations are shaped by domain-general learning processes that are operative in language use and sensitive to frequency of occurrence. Drawing on research from usage-based linguistics and cognitive psychology, the book provides an overview of frequency effects in grammar and analyzes these effects within the framework of a dynamic network model.
Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with (a) ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or (b) accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or (c) predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves all the observed problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality.
This book presents the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea. Manambu belongs to the Ndu language family, and is spoken by about 2,500 people in five villages: Avatip, Yawabak, Malu, Apa:n, and Yambon (Yuanab) in East Sepik Province, Ambunti district. About 200-400 speakers live in the cities of Port Moresby, Wewak, Lae, and Madang; and a few live in Kokopo and Mount Hagen. The book is based entirely on the author’s fieldwork. After an introductory account of the language and its speakers, Professor Aikhenvald devotes chapters to phonology, grammatical relations, word classes, gender, semantics, number, case, possession, derivation and compounding, pronouns, morphology, verbs, mood and modality, negation, clauses, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, the lexicon, current directions of change, and genetic relationship to other languages. The description is presented in a clear style in a framework that will be comprehensible to all linguists and linguistic anthropologists.
This chapter describes the clause linking constructions (CLCs) of Iquito, a Zaparoan language of northern Peruvian Amazonia, in terms of the distinction laid out in Chapter 1 between semantically focal clauses (FCs) and semantically supporting clauses (SCs).
It is now clear that languages not-genetically related can come to share syntactic structures that were not necessarily borrowed directly in their modern forms. Although it can be challenging to spot these structures, striking similarities in certain patterns and in fine details of usage may shed light on this process. Not only may spotting the patterns be a difficult task, but also establishing the source of diffusion of a trait (i.e., who passed it to whom). These points are illustrated here with constructions termed ‘adverbial clauses’. Examples are drawn from Mixtec languages. The analysis focuses on six types of adverbial clauses. In particular, it is explained how several Mixtec adverbial clause-linking strategies may have spread to Huasteca Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) and vice versa.
This book presents the first comprehensive typology of purpose clause constructions in the world’s languages. Based on a stratified variety sample of 80 languages, it uncovers the unity and diversity of the morphosyntactic means by which purposive relations are coded, and discusses the status of purpose clauses in the syntactic and conceptual space of complex sentences. Explanations for significantly recurrent coding patterns are couched in a usage-based approach to language structure, which pays due attention to the cognitive and communicative pressures on usage events involving purpose clauses, to frequency distributions of grammatical choices in corpora, and to the ways in which usage preferences conventionalize in pathways of diachronic change. The book integrates diverse previous strands of research on purpose clauses with a thorough empirical analysis in its own right and thus reflects the current state of the art of crosslinguistic research into this distinctive type of adverbial clause.
An appendix to A Typology of Purpose Clauses can be found on the author's website: www.kschmidtkebode.de/purpose.html
This study analyses the role of conjunctions in clause linkage in Australian languages. Conjunctions are seemingly straightforward clause-linking devices, but they remain under-studied, both for Australian languages and from a broader typological perspective. In this study, we propose a functional definition of conjunctions, as set against other resources for clause linkage. We show that this captures not just the prototypical free-standing elements (the equivalents of if , because , but etc.), but also various types of bound markers with a similar function (bound to clause-scoping positions or predicates). We survey the role of conjunctions in a representative sample of 53 Australian languages, showing that they are not a marginal clause linkage resource in Australia, as seems to be assumed in the relevant literature, but often form a major category within clause linkage systems. We also identify a number of areal patterns, based on the size of conjunction inventories and their morphosyntactic features.
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139025/1/Jalkunan grammar 2017 reduced.pdf
Skolt Saami is a Finno-Ugric language spoken primarily in northeast Finland by less than 300 people. The aim of this descriptive grammar is to provide an overview of all the major grammatical aspects of the language. It comprises descriptions of Skolt Saami phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morphosyntax and syntax. A compilation of interlinearised texts is provided in Chapter 11. Skolt Saami is a phonologically complex language, displaying contrastive vowel length, consonant gradation, suprasegmental palatalisation and vowel height alternations. It is also well known for being one of the few languages to display three distinctive degrees of quantity; indeed, this very topic has already been the subject of an acoustic analysis (McRobbie-Utasi 1999). Skolt Saami is also a morphologically complex language. Nominals in Skolt Saami belong to twelve different inflectional classes. They inflect for number and nine grammatical cases and may also mark possession, giving rise to over seventy distinct forms. Verbs belong to four different inflectional classes and inflect for person, number, tense and mood. Inflection is marked by suffixes, many of which are fused morphemes. Other typologically interesting features of the language, which are covered in this grammar, include (i) the existence of distinct predicative and attributive forms of adjectives, (ii) the case-marking of subject and object nominals which have cardinal numerals as determiners, and (iii) the marking of negation with a negative auxiliary verb. Skolt Saami is a seriously endangered language and it is thus hoped that this grammar will serve both as a tool to linguistic researchers and as an impetus to the speech community in any future revitalisation efforts.
Bernard Comrie defines tense as the grammaticalisation of location in time. In this textbook he introduces readers to the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world, bringing together a rich collection of illustrative material that student and specialist alike will find invaluable. This systematic account of the data is carefully integrated with a theoretical discussion of tense that is sensitive both to the range of tense oppositions found cross-linguistically and also to the constraints on that variation. For the most part the book is written without formalism, nor is it written within the framework of any specific current theory of linguistics. Nevertheless, as the final chapter makes clear, a formal theory of tense can build upon the insights gained here. For all readers, Dr Comrie's coherent and characteristically elegant account of this complex grammatical category will provide a solid basis for further research on tense, even in a language as thoroughly studied as English.
This grammar of Modern Eastern Armenian gives a precise and explicit description of the Eastern Armenian language of the Republic of Armenia. It covers not only the normative tradition but, more importantly, also describes the colloquial language as it is used in Armenia today. With regard to methodological approach and terminology it fully meets the demands of modern general linguistics and typology.
This grammar will be of interest not only to the specialised readership of descriptive and comparative linguists, of typologists and of armenologists, but to all those who would like to acquaint themselves with linguistic data from living Armenian. It will also be of use to students wishing to learn Modern Eastern Armenian and to lecturers in Modern Eastern Armenian language courses.
Hausa is a major world language, spoken as a mother tongue by more than 30 million people in northern Nigeria and southern parts of Niger, in addition to diaspora communities of traders, Muslim scholars and immigrants in urban areas of West Africa, e.g. southern Nigeria, Ghana, and Togo, and the Blue Nile province of the Sudan. It is also widely spoken as a second language and has expanded rapidly as a lingua franca. Hausa is a member of the Chadic language family which, together with Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber and Ancient Egyptian, is a coordinate branch of the Afroasiatic phylum. This comprehensive reference grammar consists of sixteen chapters which together provide a detailed and up-to-date description of the core structural properties of the language in theory-neutral terms, thus guaranteeing its on-going accessibility to researchers in linguistic typology and universals.
This book marks a new development in the field of grammaticalisation studies, in that it extends the field of grammaticalisation studies from relatively homogeneous languages to those possessing well-established and institutionalised second language varieties. In Hypothetical Modality, special reference is made to Singaporean English, a native-speaker L2 dialect of considerable importance in the South-East Asian region, and to the expression in the dialect of hypothetical modality, which appears to be indistinguishable from non-hypothetical modality in terms of the use of preterite or past forms of modal verbs. Within a grammaticalisation framework, a number of factors can be seen to be relevant to an explanation, including substratum and contact features such as tense/aspect marking, levels of lexical retention as an individual (psychological) phenomenon, and the fact that such dialects have a discontinuity in their development. In addition, the book defines pragmatic approaches to the understanding of hypothetical modality, in both diachronic and synchronic terms.
On Conditionals provides the first major cross-disciplinary account of conditional (if-then) constructions. Conditional sentences directly reflect the language user's ability to reason about alternatives, uncertainties, and unrealised contingencies. An understanding of the conceptual and behavioural organisation involved in the construction and interpretation of these kinds of sentences therefore provides fundamental insights into the inferential strategies and the cognitive and linguistic processes of human beings. The present volume brings together studies from several perspectives - philosophical, linguistic and psychological - and aims to emphasise the intrinsic connections between the issues to be addressed and to point to new directions for interdisciplinary work.
There is no country in the world where as many different languages are spoken as in New Guinea, approximately a fifth of the languages in the world. Most of these so-called Papuan languages seem to be unrelated to languages spoken elsewhere. The present work is the first truly comprehensive study of such a language, Hua. The chief typological peculiarity of Hua is the existence of a ‘medial verb’construction used to conjoin clauses in compound and complex sentences. Hua also shows a fundamental morphological distinction between coordinate and subordinate medial clauses, the latter are not ‘tense-iconic’, the events they describe are not necessarily prior to the event described in later clauses. Moreover their truth is always presupposed. The distribution and behaviour of a post-nominal suffix - mo provides insights into the nature of topics, conditional clauses, and functional definitions of the parts of speech. In phonology, the central rules of assimilation are constrained by the universal hierarchy of sonority, which may, however, be derived from binary features. These are some of the areas in which the grammar of Hua is unusually perspicuous. The present work aims at a standard of completeness such that it would be a useful reference work for research in almost any theoretical topic.
"This is the latest version of the 1956 book which began the modern study of universals, and provides the foundation for many inquiries that followed. The hypotheses are cast at a moderate level of abstraction, and so are likely to survive as a basis for inquiry for many decades to come." Prof. Dr. William Labov. 1966, 2005 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
Mosetén belongs to the small, unclassified language family Mosetenan and is spoken by roughly 800 people in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes and the adjoining lowland region. This book provides a grammatical description of Mosetén in the form of a descriptive reference grammar. It is based on the author's extensive fieldwork in Bolivia and is intended to be comprehensive and aimed at linguists from all backgrounds. Belonging to an unclassified language family, Mosetén is of special interest to typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and South Americanists. The grammar is divided into a chapter on phonology (2.) and six chapters on the morphology: morphological processes (3.) the nominal system (4.), pronouns and reference (5.), adjectives and adverbs (6.), quantification (7.) and the verbal system (8.). These chapters are followed by voice (9.), negation (10.) and modality and discourse markers (11.). Finally, there are two syntactically oriented chapters on clause types (12.) and clause combinations (13.). In the appendix, three types of texts, a list of morphemes, a list of references and further bibliographical notes are added. Furthermore, there is an index. This grammar is the first accessible and comprehensive description of a Mosetenan language. © 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
This grammar provides one of the most detailed accounts available of the syntax of a Nilo-Saharan language. It fully describes some of the unusual characteristics of Ma'di, including the different word orders associated with different tenses, the particle-based modal and focus systems, the full range of adverbials, and the structure and meaning of the noun phrase. The grammar also describes the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and aspects of the lexicon of the language. © Copyright 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. © 1994 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
Aims and Scope Gaagudju is a previously undescribed and now nearly extinct language of northern Australia. This grammar provides an overall description of the language. Australian languages generally show a high degree of structural similarity to one another. Gaagudju conforms to some of the common Australian patterns, yet diverges significantly from others. Thus while it has a standard Australian phonological inventory, its prosodic systems differ from those of most Australian languages, with stressed and unstressed syllables showing marked differences in realisation. Like many northern languages, it has complex systems of both prefixation and suffixation to nominals and verbs. Prefixation provides information about nominal classification (4 classes), mood, and pronominal cross-reference (Subjects, Objects, and Indirect Objects). Suffixation provides information about case, tense, and aspect. As in many languages, there is a clear distinction between productive and unproductive morphology. Gaagudju differs from most Australian languages in that a considerable amount of its morphology is unproductive, showing complex and irregular allomorphic variation. Gaagudju is like most Australian languages in that it may be described as a free word order language. However, word order is not totally free and strictly ordered phrasal compounding structures are significant (e.g. in the formation of denominal verbs). © Copyright 2002 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.