Correlative and Free Relative constructions in Odia and English

Abstract

The present paper investigates multiple Correlative Constructions (CC) in Odia and sketches a combined semantic and syntactic analysis. The paper describes Correlative Constructions and related constructions in Odia, with a view especially to its quantificational systems, one residing in lexical quantifiers, and one in the clause combinations which constitute CCs. Over the last decades, a growing literature has addressed similarities between CCs as instantiated in languages on the Indian subcontinent and types of Free Relatives, e.g., in English, as they occur in positions adjoined to clauses, here to be called Adjoined Free Relatives (AFRs). AFR constructions supplement lexical quantification in English in a parallel way to CCs in Odia, and we explore possibilities of representing CCs and AFR constructions within a common semantico-syntactic frame of analysis. We show how the quantificational effects of CCs can be derived from their character as relative constructions, residing in what we call co-targeted predicates, as opposed to lexical encoding of quantificational meaning through items such as ‘each’, ‘every’ and the like. We thereby describe two distinct strategies for obtaining partially similar quantificational effects, a finding which applies to CC/AFR constructions cross-linguistically.