Adverbial clauses in the Tsezic languages

This contribution summarizes and illustrates the most important types of converbs found in the Tzesic languages and describes their semantic, morphological and syntactic properties. In particular, various types of “crossclausal dependencies” as described by Gast & Diessel (this volume) are investigated, e.g. restrictions on coreference and extraction (“argumentrelated cross-clausal dependencies”) and the interpretation of scope-bearing operators such as tense, evidentiality, illocutionary force, and focus (“predicate-related cross-clausal dependencies”). In providing detailed analyses of such phenomena in a group of underresearched languages, we intend to make a contribution both to our understanding of linguistic variation in the domain of cross-clausal syntax and to our knowledge of the specific languages under investigation.