Parts-of-speech systems and dependent clauses: A typological study

Abstract

This paper investigates the degree of parallelism between the distribution of parts-of-speech classes in a language, and the distribution of dependent clause types in that language. It is hypothesized that languages with parts-of-speech classes that are specialized for a certain syntactic function have dependent clause types that are also confined to a single function. Conversely, in languages with a class of lexical items that is not specialized for a single function, but can rather be used in two or more functions, the same functional flexibility is expected in the domain of dependent clauses. These predictions are tested on a pilot sample of 12 languages, each with a different parts-of-speech system. For languages with functionally specialized parts-of-speech classes the results are as expected: their dependent clauses are also specialized. The languages with flexible parts-of-speech systems partly support the hypothesis: as expected, they have dependent clause types that can be used in more than one function. However, the distribution of these flexible constructions is not exactly the same as the distribution of the flexible parts-of-speech classes. Furthermore, in addition to flexible dependent clause types, languages with flexible parts-of-speech systems have functionally specialized dependent clause types. The results are interpreted as indicative of the interdependency between lexical and morphosyntactic typology.