The Old Avestan Correlatives

An alternative LFG analysis

Abstract

Correlatives show vastly diverse patterns across the world’s languages to the extent that it is debated whether they form a homogeneous class of syntactic constructions. This work presents the first formal account of correlatives in Old Avestan and parallel constructions such as free relatives and head-internal relative clauses. The analysis of correlatives within Lexical Functional Grammar is limited to two proposals, Butt et al. (2007) and Belyaev and Haug (2014); this work provides an alternative LFG analysis of correlatives based on the empirical assumption that the correlative clause in correlatives is fundamentally nominal, not clausal. The proposed analysis takes advantage of the parallel architecture of LFG to represent the hybrid nature of the correlative clause in Old Avestan correlatives.