Almost Everything Is Relative in the Caucasus

Embedded clauses have many forms and meanings. In particular, relative clauses, embedded declaratives, and embedded interrogative clauses are assigned very different interpretations, despite their common clausal nature. A headed relative like which Adam cooked is standardly assumed to denote the set of individuals that Adam cooked (Quine 1960; Montague 1973); a free relative like what Adam cooked denotes the (plural) individual that Adam cooked (Jacobson 1995, Caponigro 2004); an embedded declarative like that Adam cooked vegetables denotes the proposition ‘that Adam cooked vegetables’; an embedded polar interrogative like whether Adam cooked vegetables denotes a set containing the proposition ‘that Adam cooked vegetables’ and/or its negation ‘that Adam did not cook vegetables’; finally, an embedded constituent interrogative like which food Adam cooked denotes the set of propositions that are (true) answers to the question ‘which food did Adam cook?’ (see Hamblin 1973 and Karttunen 1977 for the semantics of both types of interrogatives). These differences in meaning correspond to differences in the morphosyntax: the presence or absence of a wh-word, relative pronoun, or overt complementizer; syntactic transparency (embedded declaratives) or syntactic opacity (relatives and interrogatives); and differences in the nature of the complementizer (Rizzi 1990: ch. 2). While we are used to this pattern in familiar languages, our theories of grammar do not require it to be the only one possible or necessary. In this paper, we present and analyze new empirical evidence suggesting that it actually is not the only pattern found across languages. The evidence comes from Adyghe, a Northwest Caucasian language, which behaves very differently as far as clausal subordination is concerned. What looks like the same construction (for now we will refer to it as the “mystery clause”, MC) is used to convey the five different meanings above. This raises two questions: (i) what kind of construction the MC