Adverbial clauses in Veracruz Huasteca Nahuatl from a functional-typological approach

Abstract

The typological diversity of adverbial clauses, traditionally, has been addressed by only taking into account linking devices which explicitly encode abstract semantic relationships, such as time, condition, concession and purpose, among others. However, Martowicz (2011: 1) explains that in many languages of the world, such abstract semantic relationships are not only encoded by means of linking devices, but also languages have to resort to other less-explicit strategies. Mithun (1984) explains that an adverbial construction is semantically specific if the general formal devices of the clause dictate a particular adverbial reading. For instance, although the adverbial clause may lack either of an adverbial conjunction or subordinator, the adverbial relation may reside in the combination of specific tense-aspect-mood (TAM) values; that is, the construction may recruit other less-explicit strategies. Givón (2001) proposes that in order to account for the whole range of formal devices encoding adverbial clauses in the languages of the world, we must adopt a functional definition which relies not only on semantic but also morphosyntactic criteria. Taking as point of departure what Givón explains, I define an adverbial clause as the link between two propositions in which the dependent one encodes various adverbial meanings, such as time, condition or cause/reason and adds additional information to the other proposition (the main one).