(2002). Southwest Journal of Linguistics 1/21, (University of Texas), 67-99. Eleni Bužarovska THE PURPOSE - MODIFICATION CONTINUUM: PURPOSIVE DA-RELATIVE CLAUSES IN MACEDONIAN ABSTRACT. Da-relatives in Macedonian (functionally similar to English to-relatives) are semantic and syntactic hybrids of purpose and relative clauses. They are used in informal speech to express a complex blend of purposive and modification meanings that serve to ground a new referent in the spoken discourse. The unidentified referent is modified by a future, goal-oriented event formalized by a da-relative clause. Scalar grounding of the purpose event in discourse accounts for the existence of the purpose - modification continuum. Operating on this continuum the da-relatives link the functional domain of purpose with the functional domain of modification. Thus, the da-purposive relatives illustrate gradience in semantic coding resulting in syntactic expansion of the da-constructions. Apart from pragmatic factors related to the discourse function of such purposive relatives, the use of da-relatives can be attributed to several semantic factors. The most important are: referential and temporal indeterminacy of the sentence containing a da-relative, lexical semantics of the matrix verbs with a dual thematic role assignment and the irrealis modality of the modifying event. *I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. INTRODUCTION. The aim of the study is to explore the semantic and syntactic properties of da-relative clauses in Macedonian, a South Slavic language (henceforth Mac). Formally, da-clauses such as in Baram nekoj da mi pomogne/'I am looking for someone to help me' can be considered as a subtype of purpose clauses - they have the form of "infinitival" complements that modify nominal antecedents through the purposive semantics of their complements.