The diachrony of the Basque marker bait-: from a manner expression to subordinator

• Published in: Linguistics Vol. 62; no. 3; pp. 653 - 689
• Main Author: Krajewska, Dorota
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 27-05-2024
• Subjects: adverbial clauses; Basque; complement clauses; diachrony; relative clauses
• ISSN: 0024-3949; 1613-396X
• DOI: 10.1515/ling-2021-0198

This article analyzes the diachrony of the Basque marker
, which is a verbal prefix in subordinate clauses, but also has other functions: for example, it appears in independent clauses and indefinite pronouns. In subordinate clauses, it is used in two ways. First, it co-occurs with clause-initial conjunctions in reason, manner or result clauses or with pronouns in relative clauses. Secondly, it is used on its own, in relative, reason, result and complement clauses (with a limited group of verbs, such as emotive factive predicates or predicates of happening). The article combines evidence from a corpus study (6822 examples from 16th- to 20th-century texts) and internal reconstruction to (1) determine if and in what way the subordinator
and the affirmative
‘yes’ can be diachronically related, and (2) try to establish diachronic relations between the functions of
. It is proposed that the missing link between the subordinator and the affirmative particle might be a manner expression
which had anaphoric functions. The marker
emerged as a reanalyzed form of the manner expression, which then gradually and through various pathways spread to different types of subordinate clauses and was reanalyzed as a subordinator.