Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English

Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and presented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the e¤ect of the iconicity principle on the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. The iconicity principle predicts that the linear ordering of main and subordinate clauses mirrors the sequential ordering of the events they describe. Drawing on corpus data from spoken and written English, the paper shows that, although temporal clauses exhibit a general tendency to follow the main clause, there is a clear correlation between clause order and iconicity: temporal clauses denoting a prior event precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses of posteriority. In addition to the iconicity principle, there are other factors such as length, complexity, and pragmatic import that may a¤ect the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. Using logistic regression analysis, the paper investigates the e¤ects of the various factors on the linear structuring of complex sentences.