From Performance Principles of Word Order , edited

I present evidence in this paper for a universal preference for clause-initial adverbial subordinators (subordinate conjunctions marking subordinate clauses) over clause-final subordinators. The evidence cited is based on a database containing word order characteristics for a crosslinguistic sample of 625 languages (cf. Dryer 1989b, 1991, 1992). This preference is somewhat similar to a preference for placing relative clauses after nouns, in that both preferences can be seen as manifestations of a more general universal preference for single words to precede clausal constituents with which they combine, suggesting that the two preferences reflect the same explanatory principle. Hawkins (1990) proposes that the universal preference for placing relative clauses after nouns reflects the effect of the parsing principle of Minimal Attachment. But I argue here that Hawkins' account of the preference for NRel order will not extend in any obvious fashion to the preference for clause-initial subordinators.