Basque correlatives and their kin in the history of Northern Basque

Relative correlatives in Northern Basque are more restricted than in some other languages. First, they are stylistically marked as highly rhetorical, second, they only impart a generic reading, and thus do not function like ordinary restrictive correlatives as in e.g. Hindi. This paper, which is mainly descriptive, will be concerned with the syntactic differences that help distinguish between correlative relatives and other non-root clauses with and without a wh-item: embedded questions, appositive relatives, and indefinite free relatives, semi-free relatives, conditional and unconditional protases. Hitherto unnoticed examples are provided which show how the close semantic connection between the various types of subordinated clauses examined here have triggered some interesting overlaps in the history of the language