The Syntax of Causal Clauses in Taiwan Southern Min

Causal clauses in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) are an issue that has long been ignored. Based on data drawn from corpora and recordings, by means of a diagnostic based on locality effect (Pan and Paul 2018; Pan and Zhu 2023), we argue that in’ui ‘because’ in TSM is uniformly an adverb and that topicalized objects are tolerated in S-initial causal clauses but prohibited in S-final causal clauses. Further, we propose that the external structure of causal clauses is either adjunction or predication, rather than coordination, via diagnostics regarding sentence final particles (SFPs), clause types, and scope-related factors. The diagnostic results reveal that the existence of high SFPs and the scope of negation are not necessary conditions for determining whether a causal clause in TSM qualifies as a root clause; instead, the diversity of force and quantification binding play a decisive role in defining the root status of a causal clause. With this, the external structure of causal clauses in TSM can be categorized into four types in terms of central adverbial clauses (CACs) and peripheral adverbial clauses (PACs) (Heagman 2012, 2014): (i) S-initial causal clauses, which are CACs, left-adjoined to the main clause below ForceP; (ii) irreversible S-final causal clauses, also CACs, right-adjoined to the main clause below ForceP; (iii) reversible S-final causal clauses, PACs, right- or left-adjoined to the main clause above ForceP; (iv) si-S-final causal clauses, which serve as predicates and are predicated of the main clause as a subject, are neither CACs nor PACs.