Motivations for non-iconic chronology in English narrative texts

Abstract

This study proposes a novel approach to analyzing the motivations for the occurrence of non-iconic chronology in English (as compared with German and Russian). Non-iconic chronology is represented by textual deviations from the strict temporal order of clauses, e.g., “I conquered after I came (and saw)”, as opposed to the well-known example of temporally iconic order “I came, I saw, I conquered”. Based on the corpus data outlined in Yevseyev (2011) and elsewhere, this article characterizes in a novel view a series of functional principles which have been mentioned in the literature as motivations for the breach of the principle of temporal iconicity. First, Behaghel's (1909) “law of increasing constituents” appears to influence non-iconic event coding in another way than predicted by Hawkins (1994); second, Clark and Clark's (1968) “main-clause-first principle” is obviously not applicable to sequential actions at all, it is instead reducible to another principle labeled here “Code anterior event in subordinate clause!”; third, Givón's (1985) idea of “task urgency” seems to be productive here, and developing it a step further, the “posterior-event-fronting hypothesis” is advanced and balanced against the “anterior-event-delaying hypothesis”.