Coordination, conditionals and questions: a cross-linguistic investigation

This thesis concerns the semantic relations between coordination, conditionality and interrogativity. Some aspects of these relations have been noted in work concerning grammaticalization, typology and formal semantics. A notable example is the Russian question marker li, which is also found in the form for the disjunctive marker ili 'or' and the form for the conditional marker esli 'if'. While aspects of these relations have been examined in the past, this thesis fills out the gap in the study of the relations between coordination, conditionals and questions by putting them together in a semantic map. To examine the possible universality of these relations, the use of these concepts is investigated in three unrelated languages: Dutch, Macedonian and Wolof. The relations are indicated per language in separate semantic maps and finally plotted together in a single one to examine the overlap and differences between them. The most similarities are expected between Macedonian and Dutch,...Show moreThis thesis concerns the semantic relations between coordination, conditionality and interrogativity. Some aspects of these relations have been noted in work concerning grammaticalization, typology and formal semantics. A notable example is the Russian question marker li, which is also found in the form for the disjunctive marker ili 'or' and the form for the conditional marker esli 'if'. While aspects of these relations have been examined in the past, this thesis fills out the gap in the study of the relations between coordination, conditionals and questions by putting them together in a semantic map. To examine the possible universality of these relations, the use of these concepts is investigated in three unrelated languages: Dutch, Macedonian and Wolof. The relations are indicated per language in separate semantic maps and finally plotted together in a single one to examine the overlap and differences between them. The most similarities are expected between Macedonian and Dutch, as they are both from the same family, namely Indo-European, while Wolof is an Atlantic language from the Niger-Congo family. This turns out to indeed be the case. Some of the relations are language specific, but there are universal cross-linguistic patterns, such as the relation between propositional questions and disjunction, which is found in all three of these languages. Thus, this contributes to the insight of the cross-linguistic universality of these concepts.Show less

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Coordination, conditionals and questions: a cross-linguistic investigation