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Project

Beyond the clause: Encoding and inference in clause combining

The aim of this project is to examine the interplay between inference and encoding in the emergence and development of clause combining, using methods from interactional linguistics, typology, historical linguistics and synchronic corpus analysis. The empirical focus is on how inferences can mediate paths between clause-internal categories and specialized complex sentence markers, for instance the development of modal elements to markers of conditional relations, or of cleft constructions to information structure marking. The different methods provide complementary perspectives on these processes, from the procedures that allow interactants to interpret subsequent clauses in relation to each other (interactional linguistics), over the clause-internal categories involved in these processes (typology), to the actual paths of development towards and from complex sentence markers (historical linguistics).
Date:1 Oct 2018 →  30 Sep 2022
Keywords:clause combining, interactional linguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies