36.2405, Confs: Verb-first Adverbial Clauses. A Cross-linguistic Perspective (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2405. Wed Aug 13 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2405, Confs: Verb-first Adverbial Clauses. A Cross-linguistic Perspective (Germany)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 12-Aug-2025
From: Łukasz Jędrzejowski [lukasz.jedrzejowski at uia.no]
Subject: Verb-first Adverbial Clauses. A Cross-linguistic Perspective


Verb-first Adverbial Clauses. A Cross-linguistic Perspective

Date: 22-Oct-2025 - 22-Oct-2025
Location: Hamburg, Germany
Contact: Łukasz Jędrzejowski
Contact Email: lukasz.jedrzejowski at uia.no
Meeting URL: http://www.lukasz-jedrzejowski.eu/adverbial-clauses-2/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax

Submission Deadline: 20-Sep-2025

Meeting Description:
In many languages, verb-first clauses appear not only as main clauses,
such as polar interrogatives, but also in adverbial functions,
particularly as conditional, concessive, adversative or causal
clauses. Although certain types of verb-first adverbial clauses have
been studied in languages like Dutch, German, English, and the
Scandinavian languages, their syntactic status, semantic
interpretation, and prosodic integration remain underexplored.
In the case of German, verb-first conditional clauses have
traditionally been analyzed as stylistic or positional variants of
subordinated structures introduced by conditional conjunctions (e.g.,
wenn ‘if’). This assumption has led to widespread grammatical analyses
that treat these constructions as syntactically embedded within the
matrix clause (cf. Zifonun et al. 1997: 1745–1748, 2280–2290;
Eisenberg 2020: 365–367, among others).
However, recent research has begun to challenge this consensus.
Axel-Tober & Wöllstein (2009) and Reis & Wöllstein (2010) observe that
verb-final conditionals cannot always be replaced by verb-first
variants without affecting interpretation or grammaticality,
particularly in constructions involving preference predicates, premise
conditionals or relevance conditionals (see Reis 1992; Reis &
Wöllstein 2010). They argue that verb-first adverbial clauses in both
present-day and historical stages of German are not syntactically
embedded, but instead form unintegrated structures. These clauses are
said to exhibit distinct distributional, semantic, and prosodic
properties, setting them apart from canonical subordinate clauses and
point to more fine-grained structural and interpretive constraints on
clause integration than previously assumed. In response, Pittner
(2011) offers a detailed critique and partial reassessment, contending
that conditional verb-first adverbials do not provide conclusive
evidence for non-integration (cf. also Freywald 2013). By contrast,
stronger evidence for unintegration has been observed in causal
verb-first clauses (Pittner 2011, 2023; Müller 2017; Taigel 2021; Frey
2023) and in adversative verb-first clauses (Christ 2014).
A particularly intriguing subtype of verb-first conditional clauses
involves constructions introduced by the modal verb ‘sollte’
(‘should’) in German. Unlike bare verb-first clauses, which are
generally infelicitous in speech-act related conditionals,
‘sollte’-verb-first clauses are acceptable. Reis & Wöllstein (2020:
137) attribute this to the ability of ‘sollte’, like ‘wenn’ (‘if’) or
‘falls’ (‘in case’), to explicitly mark the antecedent proposition as
potentially realizable – an interpretive feature supposed to be
lacking in bare verb-first clauses. This raises further questions
about the interpretive mechanisms and constraints governing different
types of verb-first conditional constructions.
Furthermore, verb-first adverbial clauses may serve as a heuristic for
diagnosing phenomena such as Konjunktiv (subjunctive) licensing and
the categorial status of subordinators in German. For instance,
comparative clauses introduced only by ‘als’ (‘as’) display obligatory
verb-first order and Konjunktiv marking, unlike comparable ‘als ob’
(‘as if’) clauses with verb-final order, raising questions about the
interaction of clause type, and mood (cf. Bliß 2017, 2018 for German).
Despite these important contributions, with only a few comparative
studies available (e.g., Iatridou & Embick 1994; Leuschner & Van den
Nest 2015; Leuschner 2016; Weisser 2019), the status of verb-first
adverbial clauses across languages and clause types has not been
extensively discussed.
This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on verb-first
adverbial clauses from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives,
with the goal of advancing our understanding of adverbial clause
linkage and the theoretical implications of clause integration and
independence.
The international workshop "Verb-first adverbial clauses. A
cross-linguistic perspective" is organized as part of the scientific
network ‘Adverbial Clauses and Subordinate Dependency Relationships’,
funded by the German Science Foundation (grant number 455700544) and
granted to Łukasz Jędrzejowski. The network is currently led by
Andreas Pankau. The workshop will be hosted by the Institut für
Germanistik at the University of Hamburg on October 22, 2025, and is
organized by Werner Frey and Łukasz Jędrzejowski.
Invited Speakers (all confirmed):
Sabine Iatridou (MIT)
Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Hamburg)
Karin Pittner (University of Bochum)
Hans-Martin Gärtner (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)
Call for Papers:
Topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following
questions:
– What are the semantic restrictions on verb-first adverbial clauses?
Which adverbial relations can they express? How do these vary
cross-linguistically?
– To what extent are verb-first adverbial clauses structurally
(dis)integrated with their host clause? Are all types of verb-first
adverbial clauses alike?
– Under what syntactic or semantic conditions are verb-final and
verb-first adverbial clauses interchangeable or not? What do
asymmetries reveal about the grammar of subordination and clause-type
licensing? How do verb-first adverbial clauses exactly differ? Is
their special semantic contribution truth-conditional,
presuppositional, or pragmatic?
– What factors license the use of ‘sollte‘-initial clauses in
speech-act related conditionals, a context in which other verb-first
clauses typically are unacceptable?
– Can a unified theory of V-to-C movement account for all types of
verb-first adverbial clauses? What are the implications of such
analyses for clause-typing theories?
– Can verb-first adverbial clauses serve as diagnostics for other
grammatical phenomena?
– What is the prosodic profile of verb-first adverbial clauses? How
does prosody correlate with syntactic (dis)integration? Which prosodic
cues signal clause integration or independence?
– What are the diachronic pathways that lead to the emergence of
verb-first adverbial clauses?
The workshop seeks to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on
verb-first adverbial clauses and will be followed by an international
conference on "Adverbial clauses as relative clauses: Old questions,
new answers" at the University of Hamburg (23-24 October, 2025).
We invite submission of abstracts for 40-minute oral presentations
(with additional 20 minutes for questions) on topics that address
verb-first adverbial clauses. These may include case studies as well
as formal theories of particular adverbial clause types. We also
welcome research at the interfaces with semantics, prosody, and other
areas, as long as the research makes a contribution to the area of
verb-first adverbial clauses.
Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format to
lukasz.jedrzejowski at uia.no, with all non-standard fonts embedded.
Abstracts must not exceed two pages, including data. An additional
third page may be used for references. Submissions should be in letter
or A4 format, with 1 inch (2.5 cm) margins on all sides,
single-spaced, and in a font no smaller than 11 pt. Abstracts must be
anonymous. Please ensure that PDF files do not contain any identifying
metadata. Each author may submit one individual and one joint
abstract, or two joint abstracts.
Please submit abstracts to and lukasz.jedrzejowski at uia.no no later
than September 20, 2025.
Notification:   30 September 2025
For inquiries, please send an e-mail to lukasz.jedrzejowski at uia.no
For full list of references, please visit the event website.
The workshop is funded by a German Research Foundation grant to Łukasz
Jędrzejowski (grant number 455700544).



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2405
----------------------------------------------------------