  This thesis is a corpus-based, quantitative, and typological analysis of the
functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and their finite competitors
($jegda$-'when'-clauses). The first part leverages detailed linguistic
annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency,
information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for
different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite
competitor and understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse
reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and
$jegda$-clauses in the corpus. The second part uses massively parallel data to
analyze typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of
English $when$, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle
constructions and $jegda$-clauses. Probabilistic semantic maps are generated
and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling,
precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient
dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within
the semantic space of the hypothetical concept WHEN.
