In the last twenty years, the concept of converbs has been slowly gaining traction and recognition among the wider linguistic community. The term converb is being used in place of several other older terms such as gerunds, deepričastie, adverbial participle, etc. There have been also various attempts to delimit the phenomenon, e.g. Haspelmath 1995, Ross 2016, that, however, do not agree on all aspects of the definition. Broadly speaking, converbs can be understood as adverbial verbal forms, though their actual function can vary both across languages and across constructions. We would like to discuss the following issues:

– Converbs as dependent adverbial form or a device for clause chaining?
– Coordination vs subordination (co-subordination?)
– Converbs on the margins (non-prototypical cases of converb usage)
– Use of converbs in mono-clausal multiverbal constructions (MMC)
– Is the notion of converbs cross-linguistically a useful label?

Download the program here (pdf).

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