[Lingtyp] 'If you say/ask why' > because

[Jeremy Bradley]

Dear all,

I am looking at the conventionalization, eventually grammaticalization 
of phrases meaning something along the lines of 'if you say/ask why' as 
causal conjunctions 'because', in the languages of the world. I'm 
currently aware of this happening (with some variation in the exact 
structuring) in:

Mari (Uralic)
Udmurt (Uralic)
Chuvash (Turkic)
Buryat (Mongolic)
Lezgian (Northeast Caucasian)
Tamil (Dravidian)
Middle Indo-Aryan (IE)
Japanese
Korean

... which all have in common that they're SOV languages; it strikes me 
as plausible that this is a pattern that easily arises when an SOV 
language "needs" a mechanism for a postposed causal clause. But two 
things I'm curious about:

1) Does anybody know of other languages that do this, esp. 
non-SOV-languages?

2) Does anybody know about any systematic research on this process?

Best,
Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Bradley, Ph.D.
University of Vienna

http://www.mari-language.com
jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at

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