Adverbial clauses of time, location, cause and purpose in Carapan Purepecha

Abstract

This paper describes subordinate adverbial clauses of time, place, cause and purpose in purepecha. It is shown that temporal and locative adverbial clauses are introduced by a subordinator enka, which is optionally preceded by nanior kani, forms that are identical to the interrogative words for time and place, respectively. Cause clauses are intro-duced by jimpoka, which does not correspond formally to an interrogative element. While the verb in temporal and locative clauses shows a “degraded” aspectual form (Cris-tofaro 2003), and a special subordinate mood marker, in cause clauses, degraded aspectual forms and subordinate mood are optional, alternating with full aspectual forms and indicative mood. purpose clauses contain a verb in infinitival form and are introduced by para, arguably a loan from the Spanish preposition.