Combinazione e contrasto: i connettivi congiuntivi e avversativi nelle lingue d’Europa

This paper analyzes the variety of strategies that the languages of Europe use to encode the relations of combination and contrast between states of affairs. The examined constructions, respectively called conjunctive and adversative constructions, will be identified on the basis of the semantic relation they establish and will be analyzed through a 37 European language sample. Although European languages show similar syntactic properties and tend to use connectives in order to encode the two relations, the semantics and the morphology of the attested constructions draw an interestingly complicated picture, since the connectives have different degrees of semantic specialization and morphological complexity. Two main regular patterns were found within this crosslinguistic variation. First of all, it is possible to hypothesize a continuum combination-contrast, which can be structured in terms of a semantic map. Secondly, examining the morphological complexity of the attested connectives, a structural coding implicational hierarchy will be built. Finally, a bidimensional representation will be suggested, in order to give a unified account of the two regular variation patterns identified through this work.