Mapping ‘when’-clauses in L atin A merican and C aribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology (2024)

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 in/i-grams and English iwhen/i. 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.

## introduction across the 7000+ world's languages recorded by the glottolog database @xcite 1 there is great variation in how temporal relations between different eventualities can be encoded in a sentence or discourse unit. english has one main generic temporal subordinator, when, which is relatively underspecified with respect to the temporal semantic relation between the clause it introduces and its matrix clause, compared to semantically more precise connectors (e.g. after, before, or while). the number and scope of generic temporal subordinators can vary cross-linguistically from one (e.g. italian quando), to two (e.g. german wenn/als) or several more (e.g. pular nde/si/áay/fewndo/tuma; evans 2017; pedrazzini 2023). crucially, languages can additionally or exclusively encode when-clauses 2 morphologically on the predicate, rather than using a lexified subordinator (cf. spanish viendo 'see.ger' foot_2 as opposed to cuando vio 'when saw.3.sg'; ukrainian pobačyvšy 'see.ger' as opposed to koly vyn pobačyv 'when he saw'). because of the very nature of competition, overarching semantic differences between subordination strategies within individual languages cannot be fully captured in terms of discrete, categorical variables, but they should be modeled as a continuum allowing for a degree of overlap, aiming to reveal broader patterns in a probabilistic, rather than a fully deterministic way. previous studies @xcite have employed a 'token-based approach' @xcite to explore the semantic ground covered by english when and induce cross-linguistically common semantic dimensions from parallel corpora. in @xcite , probabilistic semantic maps @xcite of when were generated from a massively parallel corpus of 1400+ linguistic varieties @xcite , to capture systematic variation in the ways languages tend to divide the semantic space of english when by using different lexical items for its different meanings. one of the greatest limitations of a purely token-based typological approach to the study of temporal subordination in the world's languages is that it does not allow to account for variation within the semantic space covered by non-lexified when-clauses crosslinguistically. that is, it will merely allow us to observe that particular subsets of when-occurrences are more likely to lack a parallel token in the target languages, without further identifying typologically widespread constructions (or gram types; dahl and wälchli 2016) within the semantic subspace of non-lexified when-clauses. while languages using predominantly or exclusively morphological means to express generic temporal subordination are relatively uncommon among european languages, non-lexified whenclauses are instead particularly frequent among latin american languages, as evidenced by the plethora of areal studies on converbal, clausebridging, and, especially, switch-reference morphology in the region @xcite @xcite @xcite . this paper zooms in on the languages of latin american and the caribbean, given the particular computational challenges posed by their common, extensive use of non-lexified when-clauses (exclusively so or in addition to lexified means). as in previous experiments, @xcite massively parallel corpus of new testament translations is used, and probabilistic semantic maps are adopted as a base method to induce typologically relevant dimensions within the semantic space of when, since they allow capturing the gradience and overlap between different means in any given language, as well as the language-internal variation which is inherent to the very concept of competition. the goal of this paper is twofold: a. incorporate associations between character ngrams and english when for capturing differences among when-clauses that are expressed morphologically as well as lexically, and generate probabilistic semantic maps based on the parallel dataset thus refined. as detailed in section 2, this method builds on asgari and schütze's (2017) 'superpivot' approach, but with substantial changes to their pipeline. crucially, it gets rid of the assumption that there should be at most one 'pivot' (i.e. a marker in a parallel language) per linguistic feature (e.g. 'past' in asgari and schütze's 2017 example), reflecting instead the existing typological knowledge about the nature of generic temporal subordination as a phenomenon with great language-internal variation. the code to achieve this is released alongside this paper as a generalized tool, which starts from one or several lexical items in a source language and can be used to look for systematic cross-linguistic variation in a parallel dataset, both at the lexical and morphological level; b. generate probabilistic semantic maps that are built exclusively on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively or predominantly use lexified connectors. the resulting maps and parallel data enriched with n-gram annotation are also released to facilitate future computational experiments. foot_3 ## conclusion & future work summary and findings this paper has presented probabilistic semantic maps of when-clauses based on a parallel corpus of new testament translations in latin american and caribbean languages. the rationale behind this study was the observation that when-clauses in the latin american region are often encoded morphologically (exclusively or predominantly so, i.e. in addition to lexified subordinators), which in previous token-based experiments (i.e. based only on full-token correspondences between languages) represented one of the main hurdles for the detection of systematic crosslinguistic variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination. it built on previous approaches based on correspondences between a source word (english when) and character n-grams, using association measures to detect meaningful groups of n-grams that are likely to represent a particular morphological marker encoding temporal subordination in each target language. the approach has yielded results that are clearly helpful in identifying morphologically-encoded when-clauses in languages where switch-reference markers (samesubject or different-subject marking) are employed to mark a predicate as subordinate to their matrix clause. the identification of groups of n-grams as switch-reference markers in some of the languages in the corpus was achieved by consulting descriptive grammars and language-specific typological studies (e.g. on the quechuan morphological system), but also because of the use of huichol, a mex-ican language with switch-reference morphology, as a point of reference to build a small benchmark and optimize hyperparameters during the genera-tion of the semantic maps. future research future studies may want to experiment with different n-gram sizes and different association measures and kriging parameters, as well as use languages other than huichol as benchmarks for the calibration of the kriging models. languages showing an opposite pattern to that of huichol (i.e. a lexified means where huichol has a morphological means, and vice versa) would particularly benefit from a close-reading evaluation to ascertain whether the method did manage to capture morphologically-expressed when-clauses as accurately as their opposite pattern. finally, the semantic dimensions in the maps have not been fully analyzed, and future studies will take a systematic approach to identifying clusters of observations that are frequently co-expressed, whether morphologically or lexically, across the languages of the corpus, and will establish whether such clusters represent crosslinguistically relevant gram types.