[Lingtyp] Negation marks adverbial clauses

[Alexander Coupe]

Dear Mohammad,

I briefly describe something like this in the Tibeto-Burman language Mongsen Ao, which lacks a lexical exponent for temporal ‘before’ and instead uses a negated converb construction to express an equivalent meaning in a non-finite clause. While the resulting meaning is also concerned with encoding a time relationship between the dependent and matrix clause events (i.e., before X happens, Y happens), it diverges somewhat from that of your examples. However, the structure is very similar. See Section 11.4.5: https://www.academia.edu/1317662/A_Grammar_of_Mongsen_Ao

I would also be interested to know how widespread this pattern might be.

Best regards,
Alec
--
Assoc. Prof. Alexander R. Coupe, Ph.D. | School of Humanities | Nanyang Technological University
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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of mohammad rasekh <mrasekhmahand at yahoo.com>
Reply to: mohammad rasekh <mrasekhmahand at yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, 11 January 2022 at 11:18 PM
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Cc: Fariba Sabouri <faribasabouri at gmail.com>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Negation marks adverbial clauses

Dear All,
I hope you have started a happy new year.
In the corpus of one of my students in Hamedani Persian (a variety spoken in Hamedan, west of Iran), we have found some adverbial clauses in which the verb is marked by negative prefix, but it does not mean negative. These adverbial clauses mark Time (meaning 'as soon as') and Reason, or both at the same time. Some examples:


1.        i               ke            kur          na-šod, man         diye          ruz-e xoš                 na-didam

        he            that         blind       NEG-become, I    anymore day-EZ happy     NEG-see-1SG
        As soon as he got blind, I had no good times.

2.      das       ke         ne-mi-keš-i                               ru harči,                       xāk-e

       hand     that      NEG-IND-touch-2SG               over     everything,       dirty-BE.3SG

    As you touch everything, it is dirty.
I wonder if there is any other language in which the adverbial clause is negative in form but not in meaning. I searched to find some evidence or some sources which mention this, but I was not successful. I appreciate your comments.
Best regards,
Mohammad

Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand
Linguistics Department,
Bu-Ali Sina University,
Hamedan, Iran.
Postal Code: 6517838695
https://basu.academia.edu/MohammadRasekhmahand
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