Correlatives
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✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.
People use terms like 'correlatives', 'the correlatives of a language', 'a correlate' (as a noun) and other variations to refer to concepts such as:
- A relationship of involvement - complementary, reciprocal, etc. (Consider e.g. correlating conjunctions).
- two (or more) correlative entities (a correlate).
- a choice in a correlative
- the words used to ask for such a choice (who, which, etc.)
- structures involved in connecting correlatives, mostly conjunctions (consider and, neither ... nor ..., not merely, but also and such)
Correlative structures commonly express multiple aspects, such as:
- intent in dialogue/semantics/other, such as:
- interrogatives (consider wh-words)
- demonstrative (consider this, there, that, thus, then, this/that/so much, etc.)
- indefinite (consider something, some kind of, somewhere, sometime, for some reason, some, someone, etc.)
- universal (consider every, all, always)
- negation (consider no kind of, never, nowhere, nothing, nobody, )
- focus, such as
- individuality
- thing
- quality
- possessor
- place
- time
- cause (why, for some reason)
- manner (consider thus, somehow, some way, any way, in every way, etc.)
- quantity (consider how much, so much, some, none/no (amount))
Languages differ in
- how many words they have to combine those and more aspects,
- how regular such words are, how they are used (whether they are pronouns, determiners, adverbs),
- how many they have had over time (English used to have more; consider words like whence),
and more