The Ordering Distribution of Main and Adverbial Clauses: A Typological Study

This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses in crosslinguistic perspective. Using a representative sample of forty languages, the author shows that the ordering of main and adverbial clauses correlates with the position of the subordinator in the subordinate clause. In languages in which adverbial clauses have a final subordinator, adverbial clauses tend to precede the main clause, whereas in languages in which adverbial clauses are marked by an initial subordinator, adverbial clauses commonly occur in both sentence-initial and sentence-final position. In the latter language type, the position of an adverbial clause varies with its meaning or function: conditional clauses precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses, which in turn are more often preposed than causal, result, and purpose clauses. The distributional patterns are explained in terms of competing motivations; it is suggested that they arise from the interaction between structural and discourse-pragmatic factors.*

Since Greenberg’s seminal work on word-order correlations it has been well known that the order of certain linguistic elements tends to correlate with the order of verb and object. For instance, in languages in which the object precedes the verb (henceforth OV languages), adpositions usually follow NP and genitives occur before the head noun, whereas in languages in which the object follows the verb (henceforth VO languages), adpositions tend to precede NP and genitives occur after the head noun. This article examines the positional patterns of adverbial clauses, which have been largely ignored in the literature on word-order correlations.¹ This is the first large-scale, crosslinguistic investigation in this domain and thus fills an important gap in the literature. Based on a representative sample of forty languages, I show that adverbial clauses are overall more common before the element that they modify, i.e. the main clause or main clause predicate.² More precisely, I show that there are two major crosslinguistic ordering patterns: (1) either a language uses adverbial clauses both before and after the main clause/predicate (and both orders are common), or (2) the adverbial clause usually precedes the main clause/predicate. What does not seem to occur is the rigid use of adverbial clauses after the main clause/predicate: if a language uses adverbial clauses in final position, it also makes common use of adverbial clauses before the main clause/predicate. In such a case (i.e. when both orders are common), the position of the adverbial clause varies with its meaning or function: conditional clauses usually precede the main clause/predicate; temporal clauses may precede or follow it; causal clauses tend to occur in sentence-final position, but occasionally they are preposed; and result and purpose clauses almost always follow the associated element.

While adverbial clause constructions that tend to precede the main clause/predicate only occur in OV languages in my sample, adverbial clauses that are commonly preand postposed occur in both VO languages and a significant minority of OV languages. If we look at the latter more closely, we find that (almost) all of them are marked by an initial conjunction or adverb, while adverbial clauses that usually precede the main clause/predicate always include a final subordinator (i.e. a final conjunction, adverb, or suffix). There is thus a strong correlation between the ordering of main clause/predicate and adverbial clause and the position of the subordinator in the subordinate clause: adverbial clauses including a final subordinator tend to precede the main clause/predicate, whereas adverbial clauses that are marked by an initial subordinator are commonly found in both initial and final position regardless of the order of verb and object.

My analysis is based on a sample of forty languages, which I selected on the basis of two criteria: genetic diversity and geographical distance. A complete list of these languages, including information about their genetic affiliations and the areas in which they are spoken, is given in Appendix A. The genetic affiliations are adopted from the Ethnologue (Grimes 1996, http://www.sil.org/ethnologuehttp://www.sil.org/ethnologue); the geographical divisions are similar to the ones suggested in Dryer...