Subordinate clauses filling a satellite position

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-434
Author(s):  
Harm Pinkster
Keyword(s):  
Morphological Type ◽  
Satellite Position ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Nominal Clauses

Chapter 16 deals with subordinate clauses, both finite and non-finite, which function as satellites in their sentence (traditionally called adverbial clauses). The finite clauses with a subordinator are discussed according to their semantic function, e.g. reason, purpose, and condition. The non-finite clauses are discussed according to morphological type: infinitives, participles (including ablative absolute clauses), gerunds, gerundives, supines, and nominal clauses.

Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Stefanie Wulff
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clause ◽  
Temporal Adverbial

ABSTRACT This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

Corpora and intuition: a study of Mandarin Chinese adverbial clauses and subjecthood

Corpora ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
May L-Y Wong
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
New Information ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clause ◽  
Linguistic Methods

This paper presents a corpus-based approach to investigating the distribution of adverbial clauses and their subjects (overt vs. non-overt) in spoken and written Mandarin Chinese. It argues that the choice of subject type is determined by three variables, namely, given-new information, semantic function of adverbial clause and text type. In written Chinese, the distribution of subject types varies across semantic classes of adverbial clauses, but not across text categories. The influence of semantic classes on the distribution of subject types, however, depends on text type. For the same semantic function, the decision as to whether to include a subject is governed by given and new information. In contrasting the distribution of subject types of adverbial clauses across speech and writing, it was found that both spoken and written Chinese use more overt subjects in clauses of reason. Methodologically, this study demonstrates how quantitative corpus-linguistic methods can be used to supplement introspective theoretical assumptions with authentic, observable evidence in order to gain better insights into the behaviour of adverbial clauses in speech and writing.

Subordinate clauses

2019 ◽  
pp. 237-288
Author(s):  
Jan Terje Faarlund
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Infinitival Clauses ◽  
Finite Verb ◽  
Nominal Clauses

In subordinate clauses, the C position is occupied by a complementizer word, which may be null. The finite verb stays in V. SpecCP is either empty or occupied by a wh-word, or by some other element indicating its semantic function. Nominal clauses are finite or non-finite. Finite nominal clauses are declarative or interrogative. Declarative nominal clauses may under specific circumstances have main clause word order (‘embedded V2’). Infinitival clauses are marked by an infinitive marker, which is either in C (Swedish), or immediately above V (Danish). Norwegian has both options. Relative clauses comprise several different types; clauses with a relativized nominal argument are mostly introduced by a complementizer; adverbial relative clauses relativize a locative or temporal phrase, with or without a complementizer; comparative clauses relativize a degree or identity. Under hard-to-define circumstances depending on language and region, subordinate clauses allow extraction of phrases up into the matrix clause.

Tupian Languages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolf Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Brazilian Coast ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
The Family ◽  
Common Term ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Adverbial Clauses

“Tupian” is a common term applied by linguists to a linguistic stock of seven families spread across great parts of South America. Tupian languages share a large number of structural and morphological similarities which make genetic relationship very probable. Four families (Arikém, Mondé, Tuparí, and Raramarama-Poruborá) are still limited to the Madeira-Guaporé region in Brazil, considered by some scholars to be the Tupí homeland. Other families and branches would have migrated, in ancient times, down the Amazon (Mundurukú, Mawé) and up the Xingú River (Juruna, Awetí). Only the Tupí-Guarani branch, which makes up about 40 living languages, mainly spread to the south. Two Tupí-Guaraní languages played an important part in the Portuguese and Spanish colonisation of South America, Tupinambá on the Brazilian coast and Guaraní in colonial Paraguay. In the early 21st century, Guaraní is spoken by more than six million non-Indian people in Paraguay and in adjacent parts of Argentina and Brazil. Tupí-Guaraní (TG) is an artificial term used by linguists to denominate the family composed by eight subgroups of languages, one of them being the Guaraní subgroup and the other one the extinct Tupinambá and its varieties. Important phonological characteristics of Tupian languages are nasality and the occurrence of a high central vowel /ɨ/, a glottal stop /ʔ/, and final consonants, especially plosives in coda position. Nasality seems to be a common characteristic of all branches of the family. Most of them show phenomena such as nasal harmony, also called nasal assimilation or regressive nasalization by some scholars. Tupian languages have a rich morphology expressed mainly by suffixes and prefixes, though particles are also important to express grammatical categories. Verbal morphology is characterized by generally rich devices of valence-changing formations. Relational inflection is one of the most striking phenomena of TG nominal phrases. It allows marking the determination of a noun by a preceding adjunct, its syntactical transformation into a nominal predicate, or the absence of any relation. Relational inflection partly occurs also in other branches and families than Tupí-Guaraní. Verbal person marking is realized by prefixing in most languages; some languages of the Tuparí and Juruna family, however, use only free pronouns. Tupian syntax is based on the predication of both verbs and nouns. Subordinate clauses, such as relative clauses, are produced by nominalization, while adverbial clauses are formed by specific particles or postpositions on the predicate. Traditional word order is SOV.

scholarly journals The Interpretation of Null Subjects in a Radical Pro-drop Language: Topic Chains and Discourse-semantic Requirements in Chinese

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Mara Frascarelli ◽  
Marco Casentini
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Significant Preference ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Null Subject Parameter ◽  
Adverbial Clauses

Abstract Based on original data collected through an online experiment, evidence is provided in this paper that the interpretation of null subjects in a radical pro-drop language like Chinese relies on the topic criterion proposed for consistent and partial pro-drop languages (Frascarelli 2007 and Frascarelli 2018), thereby supporting the theory that the null subject parameter implies an information-structural strategy for interpretation. Nevertheless, radical Chinese shows specificities that must be integrated in this theory for a comprehensive account. In particular, even though silent topic can start chains (consistent with the topic criterion), data show a significant preference for overt and local topics as antecedents. This locality requirement thus integrates phonological visibility in a general syntactic condition (minimal overt link condition), proposing an interesting parallel with the properties shown by partial pro-drop languages (Frascarelli and Jimenez-Fernandez in press). The present investigation also contributes to outline the structural differences existing between adverbial clauses in Chinese, supporting a distinction between central and peripheral adverbial clauses (Haegeman 2012). Specifically, while temporal and conditional clauses show the properties of nonrestrictive relative clauses, this is not the case for concessive clauses, which merged as subordinate clauses in either the C-domain or the high split-TP area. Differences between temporal and conditional clauses are attributed to the presence of an overt operator in the latter, and the pre-matrix position of adverbial clauses is explained in the light of their discourse role as frame-setters (Krifka 2007).

scholarly journals On adverbial clauses in spoken Lithuanian

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Erika Jasionytė-Mikučionienė
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Private Communication ◽  
Semantic Relationship ◽  
Complex Sentence ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Pragmatic Inference ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clause

The aim of the paper is to investigate adverbial clauses of time, cause, condition and concession in spontaneous private communication. The study explores semantic relations between the main and subordinate clauses, grammatical features and predominant conjunctions.The data for the research was collected from the morphologically annotated Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian, namely, its sub-corpus of spontaneous private speech which is used at home, at friends’ place, or which is produced by close friends.The analysis of spontaneous private communication shows that the finite adverbial clauses of time, cause, condition and concession are related to a set of conjunctions, but other indicators such as the use of verbal categories (especially tense, aspect and mood), contextual lexical markers as well as pragmatic inference also help to determine the semantic relationship between the main and the subordinate clause.In a spoken language, temporal clauses are usually combined with the conjunctions kai, kaip ‘when’, kol ‘while’, less frequently – with kada ‘when’; causal clauses are combined with the conjunction nes ‘because; since’, less frequently – with kad and kadangi ‘because’; conditional clauses are typically combined with the conjunction jeigu ‘if’, less frequently – with jei ‘if’, concessive clauses – with the conjunction nors ‘though’. The conjunctions kai ‘when’, kol ‘while’, kadangi ‘because’, jeigu and jei ‘if’ correlate with the particle tai that is very frequent in a spoken language, while the conjunction nors ‘though’ – with the contrastive conjunction bet ‘but’.In the natural language flow, the structure of adverbial sentences is modified: other sentential and discourse units can intervene between the main and the subordinate clauses, and the adverbial conjunction moves from the initial to the medial position.Traditional Lithuanian grammars emphasise that the position of adverbial clauses is undefined: they can appear before or after the main clause. However, the analysis of spontaneous speech shows that the position of a subordinate clause is influenced by the semantic relationship between the clauses. If a subordinate clause refers to a previous action or event, then it dominates in a preposition. Besides, the position of an adverbial clause is also influenced by correlative conjunctions: the main clause with the correlative particle tai dominates in the postposition.The research also revealed that Lithuanian adverbial clauses could function at the discourse level: in dialogues, the structure of a complex sentence is broken down and subordinate adverbial clauses can acquire additional – discourse – functions. Adverbial conjunctions, in their turn, can indicate relations with a previous discourse. 

Complex constructions in the Transeurasian languages

2020 ◽  
pp. 625-642
Author(s):  
Andrej Malchukov ◽  
Patryk Czerwinski
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Dominant Strategy ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Considerable Detail

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.

The Survival of the Subjunctive

1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Peters
Keyword(s):  
Australian Study ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Status ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Age Range ◽  
Prevailing View

The status of the subjunctive is examined in this Australian study of its manifestations in subordinate clauses: in mandative constructions as well as those expressing purpose, condition, concession and the counterfactual. Data from the Australian ACE corpus (1986) is compared with (a) those from the American Brown corpus and the British LOB corpus (both 1961); and with (b) findings from an Australian elicitation survey of 1993. Both the diachronic corpus comparisons and the sociolinguistic profiles associated with the survey indicate declining use of the subjunctive in adverbial clauses, most notably the counterfactual type, but also those expressing purpose, concession and ordinary conditions. However the use of mandative subjunctives is stable, written into a range of corpus materials (fiction and non-fiction), and endorsed by Australians across the age range. The resilience of the mandative subjunctive in Australian (and American) usage contrasts with the prevailing view of British usage commentators, that the subjunctive, if not obsolescent, should not be preserved.

scholarly journals COMPLEX SENTENCES IN TEXTS OF INFORMED CONSENT FOR DENTAL TREATMENT: STRUCTURAL, SEMANTIC, COMMUNICATIVE AND DISCOURSIVE ASPECTS

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-147
Author(s):  
Victoria Kostenko ◽  
Olena Bieliaieva ◽  
Iryna Solohor
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Dental Treatment ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Communicative Strategy ◽  
Patient’S Perception

This article presents investigation of the structural and semantic characteristics of complex sentences and their contribution to implementing communicative strategies in the texts of informed consent for dental treatment. Informed consent is a bilateral document that provides a sufficient amount of specific information about the character of dental intervention, records the communication between doctor and patient in order to enable patients to make voluntary decisions concerning the exposure to potentially dangerous procedures. Complex sentences have been found out as one of the most common types of sentences in the texts studied. Although there is a wide range of complex sentences of different formal and semantic-syntactic types in the informed consent, some types are more prevalent than others. The two most common types of subordinate clauses have been identified: noun clauses as a direct object and adverbial clauses of condition. Complex sentences with objective clauses often contain cognitive or volitional verbs in the independent clause and are characterized by semantic and structural incompleteness, while the subordinate clause is a semantic center, which reveals, explains or complements the scope of the main clause. This type of complex sentences serves as one of the means to implement the communicative tactics guiding and controlling the patient’s perception of medical information. Conditional sentences specifying the circumstances and in particular those demonstrating the cause-effect relationship in the form of implicitation reasoning formulae are applied to implement the information communicative strategy. The considerable number of explanatory constructions (concretization, description, addition, clarification) serves to facilitate clearer understanding of the special information, thus implementing the information communicative strategy. The complex sentences are to increase the density of information and to focus on the addressee’s attention to the most relevant segments of the sentence and text. The predominance of complex sentences demonstrates the interaction of two tendencies: to compress the ramified logical relationship between phenomena, processes, situations within a sentence on the one hand, and to provide additional and sometimes redundant information in order to reduce the chance that a message will be misinterpreted, on the other hand. These tendencies incorporated on the syntax level by complex sentences are important preconditions for effective communication in giving / obtaining voluntary informed consent for dental treatment.

Subordinate clauses with nouns, adjectives, and adverbs

2021 ◽  
pp. 435-470
Author(s):  
Harm Pinkster
Keyword(s):  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Nominal Clauses

Chapter 17 deals with subordinate clauses, both finite and non-finite, which depend on nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. Some of these clauses are required by the meaning of the governing word, others are optional. A distinction is made between declarative, interrogative, and imperative subordinate clauses. They are discussed according to the various subordinating devices: subordinators (e.g. quod, ut), question particles, infinitives (including accusative and infinitive clauses), gerunds, supines, and nominal clauses.

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