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Unions as multi-predicate clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

William Davies  and
Carol Rosen
William Davies
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
Carol Rosen
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

Research on ‘universals of union’, fueled by new data on causatives and by the recognition of non-causative unions, has taken an unexpected turn. For over ten years it presupposed a certain structure and sought LAWS SPECIFIC TO UNION. Remarkably, the empirical findings suggest the opposite: union has a structure never hypothesized for it before (one clause where TWO OR MORE PREDICATES occur successively)—and there is little to stipulate, since nearly all observed effects are entailed by broader laws of clause structure. Further, the new analysis delimits the class of unions more narrowly, and reconciles them with otherwise problematic rules in Italian, Quechua, Tamil, and Turkish.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 52 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

* For comments on an earlier version of this paper, we are grateful to Judith Aissen, Sandra Chung, Stanley Dubinsky, Nora Gonzalez, Wayne Harbert, Alice Harris, David Perlmutter, Paul Postal, and Geoffrey Pullum. We are indebted to Işik Bengi and İnci Özkaragöz for assistance with the Turkish data in §4.1. For introduction to the RG framework and formalism, see the papers in Perlmutter 1983b, Perlmutter & Rosen 1984.

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