Mapping 'when'-clauses in Latin American and Caribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Latin American and Caribbean languages encode 'when'-clauses, using probabilistic semantic maps to analyze both lexical and morphological strategies for temporal subordination.

Contribution

It introduces a novel probabilistic mapping approach that captures morphological clause-linkage devices alongside lexical connectors, enabling comprehensive typological analysis.

Findings

Morphological marking of 'when'-clauses is prevalent in the region.

Probabilistic semantic maps effectively represent typological variation.

The method facilitates strategy-agnostic analysis of temporal subordination.

Abstract

Languages can encode temporal subordination lexically, via subordinating conjunctions, and morphologically, by marking the relation on the predicate. Systematic cross-linguistic variation among the former can be studied using well-established token-based typological approaches to token-aligned parallel corpora. Variation among different morphological means is instead much harder to tackle and therefore more poorly understood, despite being predominant in several language groups. This paper explores variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination ('when'-clauses) among the languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, where morphological marking is particularly common. It presents probabilistic semantic maps computed on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively use lexified connectors, incorporating associations between character $n$-grams and English $when$. The approach allows capturing morphological clause-linkage devices in addition to lexified connectors, paving the way for larger-scale, strategy-agnostic analyses of typological variation in temporal subordination.