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.