In this talk I explore the distinction between universal and definite interpretations of WHEN-clauses. This is lexicalized in some well-known languages, such as German (wenn/als), but not much discussed in the typological literature. Through semantic maps extracted from a massive parallel corpus of Bible texts (Mayer and Cysouw 2014), I show, following Haug and Pedrazzini (2023), that it is a wide-spread distinction. Moreover, there is a parallel distinction between universal and definite interpretations of correlatives and headless relative clauses, which are often source constructions for WHEN-clauses. In correlatives, this distinction is predictable from the (historical) morphology of the relativizer, as shown by Belyaev and Haug 2020. I explore whether WHEN-clauses display a similar connection between morphology and meaning.
Belyaev, O. and Haug, D. (2020), The genesis and typology of correlatives, Language 96.
Haug, D. and Pedrazzini, N. (2023), The semantic map of when and its typological parallels, manuscript under review.
Mayer, T. and Cysouw, M. (2014). Creating a massively parallel Bible corpus. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14)