INTRODUCTION

Terms like ‘conditional’, ‘temporal’, ‘causal’, ‘concessive’ are part of the terminological inventory that traditional grammar makes available for the characterization of adverbial clauses. The distinctions drawn by these terms seem clear enough until an attempt is made to explicate them in a way that would have crosslinguistic validity, or to apply them in an exhaustive characterization of all kinds of data within a single language. To begin with, there are nonspecific constructions to which several of these terms or none at all seem to be applicable. Examples are nonfinite constructions such as adverbial participles in Russian, the gerundio in Italian, the construction tout en V-ant in French or participial constructions in English. A sentence like the following may have a conditional or a causal interpretation depending on the context:

1. (1) Lacking that, the movement is dead

Or, to give an example of a different type, the construction Adj as NP be in English merely expresses factuality and is open to both a causal and concessive interpretation:

1. (2) a. Rich as he is, he spends a lot of money on horses (causal)

2. b. Poor as he is, he spends a lot of money on horses (concessive)

But even cases where the adverbial relation in question is marked by a conjunction are sometimes difficult to assign to one rather than another category.