Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses

Abstract

This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses. Using corpus data from spoken and written English, it is shown that the positioning of finite adverbial clauses vis-a-vis the main clause varies with their meaning or function: conditional clauses tend to precede the main clause, temporal clauses are common in both initial and final position, and causal clauses usually follow the main clause. The article argues that the positional patterns of adverbial clauses are motivated by competing functional and cognitive forces. Specifically, it is shown that final occurrence of adverbial clauses is motivated by processing, while initial occurrence results from semantic and discourse pragmatic forces that may override the processing motivation.