Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-tnzcf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T16:20:25.126Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Genesis and Typology of Correlatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Oleg Belyaev and
Dag Haug
Oleg Belyaev*
Affiliation:
Lomonosov Moscow State University and Pushkin State Russian Language Institute
Dag Haug*
Affiliation:
University of Oslo
*
Belyaev, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Lomonosov Moscow State University Leninskie gory, 1st Humanities Building 119991 GSP-1 Moscow, Russia, [belyaev@ossetic-studies.org]
Haug, Department of Linguistics and Nordic Studies, University of Oslo, PO Box 1102 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway, [daghaug@ifikk.uio.no]
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article argues for a new theory of the origin of WH-correlatives from indefinite uses of WH-words in paratactic or asyndetic conditionals. We show that this theory predicts a generalization that has so far gone unnoticed: WH-based correlatives always have a universal reading; they may also have a definite reading, which may be morphologically marked. This is in contrast to correlatives where the relativizer originates from a demonstrative element: these always have a definite reading and may also have a universal reading. We demonstrate the validity of this generalization on a data set containing thirty-eight correlative structures from thirty-two languages, that is, all of the correlative structures that are sufficiently well described in the literature.

Keywords

correlativesrelative clausesindefinite pronounshistorical syntaxgrammaticalizationDRT

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 96 , Issue 4 , December 2020, pp. 874 - 907
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this work have been presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 19 (2014), Diachronic Generative Syntax 17 (2015), and the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (2015). We are grateful to the participants at those conferences for their questions and comments. We also express our deep gratitude to Mary Dalrymple, Regine Eckardt, Maria Kholodilova, Tatiana Nikitina, Andrej Sideltsev, Rob Truswell, Igor Yanovich, two anonymous Language referees, and associate editor David Willis for their insightful remarks and additions to earlier drafts of this article. We also specifically thank the following people for their consultations on individual languages and examples: Sangyub Baek (Tungusic, Sinitic), Yulia Galyamina (Ket), Stefan Georg (Ket), Thomas Lehmann (Tamil), Andrey Nefedov (Ket), and Anton Zimmerling (Old Czech). Oleg Belyaev's research has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project no. 18-18-00462.

References

Andrews, Avery. 1975. Studies in the syntax of relative and comparative clauses. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Online: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/27379.Google Scholar
Arsenijević, Boban. 2009. {Relative {conditional {correlative clauses}}}. In Lipták 2009a, 131–56.Google Scholar
Asher, Nicholas, and Lascarides, Alex. 2003. Logics of conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Authier, Gilles. 2009. Grammaire kryz (Langue caucasique d'Azerbaïdjan, dialecte d'Alik). Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar
Baek, Sangyub. 2016. Tungusic from the perspective of areal linguistics. Sapporo: Hokkaido University dissertation.Google Scholar
Bauer, Jaroslav. 1972. Phénomènes centraux et périphériques dans l'évolution du système syntaxique de la langue tchèque. Syntactica slavica: Vybrané práce ze slovanské skladby, vol. 1, 35–46. Brno: Universita J. E. Purkyně.Google Scholar
Belyaev, Oleg I. 2014. Korreljativnaja konstrukcija v osetinskom jazyke v tipologičeskom osveščenii [Ossetic correlatives in typological perspective]. Moscow: Lomonosov Moscow State University dissertation.Google Scholar
Belyaev, Oleg, and Haug, Dag. 2014. Pronominal coreference in Ossetic correlatives and the syntax-semantics interface. Proceedings of the LFG '14 Conference, 89–109. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/19/papers/lfg14belyaevhaug.pdf.Google Scholar
Bende-Farkas, Ágnes. 2015. The landscape of universal quantification in Old Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 62(3). 223–61. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26191778.10.1556/064.2015.62.3.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhatt, Rajesh. 2003. Locality in correlatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 210. 485–541. DOI: 10.1023/A:1024192606485.10.1023/A:1024192606485CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birnbaum, Henrik. 1974. On Old Russian and Old Scandinavian legal language: The Russkaja pravda and medieval Swedish law. On medieval and renaissance Slavic writing, ed. by Birnbaum, Henrik, 234–59. The Hague: Mouton.10.1515/9783110885910CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bittner, Maria. 2001. Topical referents for individuals and possibilities. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 11. 36–55. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v11i0.2854.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bjorkman, Bronwyn Moore. 2013. A syntactic answer to a pragmatic puzzle: The case of asymmetric and. Syntax and its limits, ed. by Folli, Raffaella, Sevdali, Christina, and Truswell, Rob, 391–408. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683239.003.0019.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683239.003.0019CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borgman, Donald M. 1990. Sanuma. Handbook of Amazonian languages, vol. 2, ed. by Derbyshire, Desmond C. and Pullum, Geoffrey K., 15–248. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Brasoveanu, Adrian. 2008. Uniqueness effects in correlatives. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12. 47–65. DOI: 10.18148/sub/2008.v12i0.575.Google Scholar
Cable, Seth. 2009. The syntax of the Tibetan correlative. In Lipták 2009a, 195–222.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2005. A note on verb/object order and head/relative clause order. University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 15. 49–104.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2012. Five notes on correlatives. Typological studies: Word order and relative clauses, 208–17. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Creissels, Denis. 2009. Les relatives corrélatives: Le cas du malinké de Kita. Langages 174. 39–52. DOI: 10.3917/lang.174.0039.10.3917/lang.174.0039CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culicover, Peter W., and Jackendoff, Ray. 1997. Semantic subordination despite syntactic coordination. Linguistic Inquiry 28(2). 195–217. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178974.Google Scholar
Dayal, Veneeta. 1995. Quantification in correlatives. Quantification in natural languages, vol. 2, ed. by Bach, Emmon W., Jelinek, Eloise, Kratzer, Angelika, and Partee, Barbara H., 179–205. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
de Vries, Mark. 2002. The syntax of relativization. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam dissertation. Online: https://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.192704.Google Scholar
Delbrück, Berthold. 1900. Grundriss der vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprach, vol. 5: Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen, part 3. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner.Google Scholar
Demirok, Ömer. 2017. A compositional semantics for Turkish correlatives. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 34. 159–66. Online: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/34/paper3308.pdf.Google Scholar
Diewald, Gabriele. 2002. A model for relevant types of contexts in grammaticalization. New reflections on grammaticalization: International symposium, Potsdam, 17–19 June, 1999, ed. by Wischer, Ilse and Diewald, Gabriele, 103–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Order of relative clause and noun. The world atlas of language structures online, ed. by Dryer, Matthew S. and Haspelmath, Martin. Anthropology, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary. Online: http://wals.info/chapter/90, accessed April 12, 2019.Google Scholar
Dumestre, Gérard. 2003. Grammaire fondamentale du bambara. Paris: Éditions Karthala.Google Scholar
Eckardt, Regine. 2006. Meaning change in grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262601.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckardt, Regine. 2011. Semantic reanalysis and language change. Language and Linguistics Compass 5(1). 33–46. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00260.x.10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00260.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gärtner, Hans-Martin. 2009. More on the indefinite-interrogative affinity: The view from embedded non-finite interrogatives. Linguistic Typology 13. 1–37. DOI: 10.1515/LITY.2009.001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 2009. The genesis of syntactic complexity: Diachrony, ontogeny, neuro-cognition, evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.146CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosu, Alexander, and Landman, Fred. 1998. Strange relatives of the third kind. Natural Language Semantics 6(2). 125–70. DOI: 10.1023/A:1008268401837.10.1023/A:1008268401837CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hackstein, Olav. 2004. Rhetorical questions and the grammaticalization of interrogative pronouns as conjunctions in Indo-European. Per aspera ad asteriscos: Studia indoger-manica in honorem Jens Elmegård Rasmussen sexagenarii Idibus Martiis anno MMIV, ed. by Hyllested, Adam, Jørgensen, Anders Richard, Larsson, Jenny Helena, and Olander, Thomas, 167–86. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Hahn, E. Adelaide. 1946. The origin of the relative kwi- kwo-. Language 22(2). 68–85. DOI: 10.2307/410340.Google Scholar
Hahn, E. Adelaide. 1949. The non-restrictive relative in Hittite. Language 25(4). 346–74. DOI: 10.2307/409862.10.2307/409862CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59(4). 781–819. DOI: 10.2307/413373.10.2307/413373CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. The adjoined relative clause in Australia. Grammatical categories in Australian languages, ed. by Dixon, R. M. W., 78–105. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
Harris, Alice C. 1994. On the history of relative clauses in Georgian. Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR: Papers from the fourth conference, ed. by Aronson, Howard I., 130–42. Columbus, OH: Slavica.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haudry, Jean. 1973. Parataxe, hypotaxe et corrélation dans la phrase latine. Bulletin de la société de linguistique de Paris 68(1). 147–86.Google Scholar
Haug, Haug Dag Trygve. 2013. Partial dynamic semantics for anaphora: Compositionality without syntactic coindexation. Journal of Semantics 31(4). 457–511. DOI: 10.1093/jos/fft008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haug, Haug Dag Trygve. 2016. PIE ∗kwi/kwo-: Interrogative, indefinite or both? Tavet tat satyam: Studies in honor of Jared S. Klein on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, ed. by Byrd, Andrew Miles, DeLisi, Jessica, and Wenthe, Mark, 86–100. Ann Arbor, MI: Beech Stave.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd, and Kuteva, Tania. 2003. On contact-induced grammaticalization. Studies in Language 27(3). 529–72. DOI: 10.1075/sl.27.3.04hei.10.1075/sl.27.3.04heiCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd, and Kuteva, Tania. 2006. The changing languages of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297337.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hendery, Rachel. 2012. Relative clauses in time and space. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.101CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hermann, Karl Friedrich. 1850. Disputatio de protasi paratactica. Göttingen: Officina Academica Dieterichiana.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, James. 1984. English is not a context-free language. Linguistic Inquiry 15(2). 119–26. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178381.Google Scholar
Hock, Hans Heinrich. 2008. Dravidian syntactic typology: A reply to Steever. Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics, ed. by Singh, Rajendra, 163–98. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110211504.2.163.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J., and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139165525CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huggard, Mattyas. 2015. Wh-words in Hittite: A study in syntax-semantics and syntax-phonology interfaces. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation. Online: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gb9f3dg.Google Scholar
Kadmon, Nirit. 1990. Uniqueness. Linguistics and Philosophy 13(3). 273–324. DOI: 10.1007/BF00627710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamp, Hans. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. Formal methods in the study of language, ed. by Groenendijk, Jeroen A. G., Janssen, Theo M. V., and Stokhof, Martin B. J., 277–322. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre.Google Scholar
Karttunen, Lauri. 1977. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 1(1). 3–44. DOI: 10.1007/BF00351935.10.1007/BF00351935CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, Edward L. 1985. Relative clauses. Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 2: Complex constructions, ed. by Shopen, Timothy, 141–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Keshet, Ezra. 2013. Focus on conditional conjunction. Journal of Semantics 30(2). 211–56. DOI: 10.1093/jos/ffs011.10.1093/jos/ffs011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika, and Shimoyama, Junko. 2002. Indeterminate pronouns: The view from Japanese. The proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (Hituzi Syobo), ed. by Otsu, Yukio, 1–25.Google Scholar
Kroll, Wilhelm. 1910. Der lateinische Relativsatz. Glotta 3(1). 1–18. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40264752.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. 2015. Thoughts on grammaticalization. 3rd edn. Berlin: Language Science. DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b88.98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipták, Anikó. 2008. On the correlative nature of Hungarian left-peripheral relatives. Dislocated elements in discourse: Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives, ed. by Shaer, Benjamin, Cook, Philippa, Frey, Werner, and Maienborn, Claudia, 398–430. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lipták, Anikó (ed.) 2009a. Correlatives cross-linguistically. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/lfab.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipták, Anikó. 2009b. The landscape of correlatives: An empirical and analytical survey. In Lipták 2009a, 1–48.Google Scholar
Luján, Eugenio R. 2009. On the grammaticalization of ∗kwi/∗kwo in Proto-Indo-European. Grammatical change in Indo-European languages, ed. by Bubenik, Vit, Hewson, John, and Rose, Sarah, 221–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Makeeva, Nadežda V. 2013. Kommunikativnye strategii i korreljativnaja konstrukcija v jazyke kla-dan i drugix južnyx mande [Communicative strategies and correlatives in Kla-Dan and other Southern Mande languages]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 2013(1). 77–94. Online: http://vja.ruslang.ru/en/archive/2013-1/77-94.Google Scholar
Milsark, Gary L. 1974. Existential sentences in English. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Mithun, Marianne. 2012. Questionable relatives. Relative clauses in languages of the Americas, ed. by Comrie, Bernard and Estrada-Fernández, Zarina, 269–300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.102.13mitCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitrenina, Olga. 2010. Correlatives: Evidence from Russian. Formal studies in Slavic linguistics: Proceedings of Formal Description of Slavic Languages 7.5, ed. by Zybatow, Gerhild, Dudchuk, Philip, Minor, Serge, and Pshehotskaya, Ekaterina, 135–52. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Muskens, Reinhard. 1996. Combining Montague semantics and discourse representation. Linguistics and Philosophy 19. 143–86. DOI: 10.1007/BF00635836.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nikitina, Tatiana. 2012. Clause-internal correlatives in Southeastern Mande: A case for the propagation of typological rara. Lingua 122(4). 319–34. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2011.12.001.10.1016/j.lingua.2011.12.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nordlinger, Rachel. 2006. Spearing the emu drinking: Subordination and the adjoined relative clause in Wambaya. Australian Journal of Linguistics (Special issue: Subordination in Australian Aboriginal languages) 26(1). 5–29. DOI: 10.1080/07268600500531610.10.1080/07268600500531610CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Partee, Barbara H. 1991. Topic, focus and quantification. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 1. 159–88. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v1i0.2918.Google Scholar
Paul, Hermann. 1909. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. 4th edn. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Polinsky, Maria. 2015. Tsez syntax. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, ms. Online: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002315, accessed May 28, 2018.Google Scholar
Probert, Philomen. 2006. Clause boundaries in Old Hittite relative sentences. Transactions of the Philological Society 104(1). 17–83. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-968X.2006.00165.x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1985. On two recent attempts to show that English is not a CFL. Computational Linguistics 10(3–4). 182–86. Online: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J84-3003.Google Scholar
Rebuschi, Georges. 2009. Basque correlatives and their kin in the history of Northern Basque. In Lipták 2009a, 81–130.Google Scholar
Schmerling, Susan. 1975. Some remarks on symmetric and asymmetric conjunctions. Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts, ed. by Cole, Peter, 211–32. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Srivastav, Veneeta. 1991. The syntax and semantics of correlatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 9(4). 637–86. DOI: 10.1007/BF00134752.10.1007/BF00134752CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wegener, Philipp. 1874. Der lateinische Relativsatz. Treptow an der Rega: Fr. Lehfeldt.Google Scholar
Wessén, Elias. 1965. Svensk språkhistoria 3: Grundlinjer til en historisk syntax. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Yanovich, Igor. 2005. Choice-functional series of indefinite pronouns and Hamblin semantics. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 15. 309–26. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v15i0.2921.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Belyaev and Haug supplementary material

Belyaev and Haug supplementary material
Download Belyaev and Haug supplementary material(File)
File 397.4 KB