ON PURPOSE AND CAUSAL ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN YAQUI

This paper examines the syntactic structures that express purpose and causal adverbial relations in the Yaqui language. Yaqui displays considerable structural variation when expressing purpose and cause, and each of the linked units exhibits different degrees of syntactic and semantic integration with the main unit. In use, purpose clauses express the agent’s intention to bring about another event, whereas causal clauses express several related meanings, from cause-effect to reason and explanation, and even consequence. Yaqui purpose clauses display two undescribed kinds of variation in typologically common patterns: they demand argument sharing and a special lexical coding on shared arguments. These constraints are not found in causal clauses. The contrasts observed between these two semantically related adverbial clauses favor the analysis of Yaqui purpose clauses as a kind of referential control construction.