Situation relatives: Deriving causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose

Building on previous work on the syntax and semantics of subordinate clauses, Arsenijević (2006) argues that all subordinate clauses are derived by a generalized pattern of relativization. One argument in the clause is abstracted, turning the clause into a predicate over the respective type. This predicate combines with an argument of that type in another expression and figures as its modifier. The traditional taxonomy of subordinate clauses neatly maps onto the taxonomy of arguments – from the arguments selected by the verb to the temporal argument, or the argument of comparison. One striking anomaly is that five traditional clause types – conditional, counterfactual, concessive, causal, and purpose clauses – are best analyzed as involving abstraction over the situation argument. In this paper, I present a situation-relative analysis of the five types of subordinate clauses, where their distinctive properties range in a spectrum predicted by their compositional makeup. I argue that they all restrict the situation argument selected by a speech act, attitude, or content predicate of thematrix clause, and hence effectively restrict this predicate. This gives the core of their meaning, while their differences are a matter of the status of an implication component common for all five types, the presupposition of truth for the subordinate and matrix clause, and an implicature of exhaustive relevance of the former. Predictions of the analysis are formulated, tested, and confirmed on data from English and Serbo-Croatian.