[Lingtyp] Position of before-clauses

[Alexander Coupe]

Dear Jesús,

Thompson & Longacre (1985: 182-183) have a brief but informative discussion of before-clauses and present examples in Mandarin and Lakhota that demonstrate the preposed position. They also discuss a number of languages that have no lexical exponent for ‘before’; these require a negated verb stem to express a functionally-equivalent, temporally antecedent proposition, and some additionally take a dependent-marking affix on their negated stems.

Mongsen Ao uses the preposed negated verb stem strategy in combination with a locative converb suffix or a temporal adverb to express ‘before’ – see Coupe (2007: 447-448) for textual examples. I just elicited examples from my Yimkhiung and Khiamniungan social media contacts in eastern Nagaland and both these languages similarly use a negated verb to express ‘before’, so the pattern could be an areal feature of the TB languages of this region if it’s not more widely attested in TB.

It’s likely that some languages permit pragmatics to determine the position of such clauses vis-à-vis the main clause, but an even stronger influence on structure could be the head-final typology of clause-chaining languages like Ao, Yimkhiung and Khiamniungan that usually requires dependent converb clauses to precede their main clauses. That syntactic requirement may override any semantic preference for iconic ordering.

Best regards,
Alec

References
Coupe, Alexander R. 2007. A grammar of Mongsen Ao. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thompson, Sandra & Robert E. Longacre. 1985. Adverbial clauses. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.) Language typology and syntactic description Vol. II: complex constructions, 171-234. Cambridge: CUP.

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Jesus Francisco Olguin Martinez <olguinmartinez at ucsb.edu>
Date: Monday, 12 July 2021 at 10:45 AM
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Position of before-clauses

Dear all,

I hope this email finds you well.

As you know,  it is expected that before-clauses occur postposed to the main clause (e.g. I left before she arrived). This stems from the fact that they refer to a situation that occurs posterior to the one in the main clause (Diessel 2008: 470). However, the position of the before-clause tends to be non-iconic in many languages of my sample (e.g. before she arrived, I left).

I was wondering if you know any languages in which the before-clause can only occur preposed to the main clause (e.g. before she arrived, I left). That is, are there any languages in which before-clauses only show non-iconic order? Any readings that have explored this aspect?

Thank you very much in advance.

Best,
--
Jesús Olguín Martínez
Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/people/jesús-olguín-martínez<http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/people/jes%C3%BAs-olgu%C3%ADn-mart%C3%ADnez>
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