| Abstract | Adverbial subordinators are the most abundant and complex group of subordinators in the English language. Not only are they the richest group of subordinators in English, but they are as common in other languages across the world, including Croatian. This complexity can be seen in the fact that, unlike other groups of subordinators, adverbial subordinators were designed to convey a certain meaning or semantic reading within a complex sentence. The clauses they introduce, i.e., adverbial clauses, by no means represent complement clauses like subject or object clauses, but may be added as additional circumstantial information or supplementary context. Moreover, the division of adverbial clauses into different semantic groups has never been unanimously agreed upon, especially when one considers how differently various languages mark abstract circumstances like condition, concession, etc. However, the more intriguing part about adverbial subordinators is the fact that sometimes, some of them may lend themselves to expressing other than their primary semantic function, i.e., they may be polysemous. A typical example are temporal subordinators also/alternatively expressing cause. This paper covers adverbial subordinators in English and Croatian. The focus is on subordinators that primarily and/or exclusively express causality but more so on those that have other primary functions, like the expression of time, but may lend themselves to causal interpretations. The paper surveys some of the relevant literature in the field and uses authentic corpus examples for purposes of illustration. |
