Ursula Lenker and Anneli Meurman-Solin 2007: Connectives in the History of

Clause connection has been of recurrent interest in the study of languages, but it has flourished most vigorously over the last 30 years, especially from the point of view of typological studies (Givón 1979; Haiman and Thompson 1988; Lehmann 1988) and grammaticalization studies (Hopper and Traugott 2003), the latter heavily influenced by the former, since they normally have cross-linguistic scope and investigate common paths of development across languages. In addition to these general studies, research on the evolution of specific types of connectives and individual connectors in the English language has also gained in momentum, the present volume being a good illustration of this. On adverbial connectives, particularly worthy of mention is König’s (1992) and Leuschner’s (2006) research on concessive and concessive-conditional clauses. The case of complementation in the history of the English language has been more amply analyzed (Warner 1982; Fanego 1992; López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 1998, 2001; Los 2005, etc.). As to relative clauses, they were a favoured object of study in the 1960s (e.g. Rydén 1966), again in the 80s (e.g. Romaine 1982), and have attracted interest once more, from the perspective of clause connection (Suárez-Gómez 2006)