Abstract

This study examines immediate precedence constructions (IMPREC), which are complex sentence constructions that encode ‘right before event X, event Y occurs’, across a wide range of languages. IMPREC has not previously been studied in detail, and this study is the first to investigate it by using a sample of 50 languages from 26 lineages (22 language families and 4 language isolates). The results indicate that, first, many IMPREC constructions are not derived from ‘before’ constructions. Second, unlike ‘before’ clauses, negators rarely appear in IMPREC clauses as there is no need to disambiguate the IMPREC function from other temporal relations. Moreover, IMPREC clauses commonly denote an event which is pragmatically assumed to be unrealized. Third, IMPREC clauses most commonly precede figure clauses. Fourth, some IMPREC clauses are downgraded, e.g. the verb is marked by a nominalizer. Finally, a strong irrealis marker is not found to block the use of a weak irrealis marker, nor is a specialized IMPREC marker found to block the use of an irrealis marker. This study shows that IMPREC and ‘before’ are two distinguished functions, encouraging linguists to examine IMPREC in grammatical descriptions.

Download full article (PDF)