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The positioning of concessive adverbial clauses in English: assessing the importance of discourse-pragmatic and processing-based constraints1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2013

DANIEL WIECHMANN  and
ELMA KERZ
DANIEL WIECHMANN
Affiliation:
Department of English, American and Romance Language Studies, RWTH Aachen University, Kármánstr. 17/19, D-52062 Aachen, Germanywiechmann@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de, kerz@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de
ELMA KERZ
Affiliation:
Department of English, American and Romance Language Studies, RWTH Aachen University, Kármánstr. 17/19, D-52062 Aachen, Germanywiechmann@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de, kerz@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de
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Abstract

English permits adverbial subordinate clauses to be placed either before or after their associated main clause. Previous research has shown that the positioning is conditioned by various factors from the domains of semantics, discourse pragmatics and language processing. With the exception of Diessel (2008), these factors have never been investigated in concert, which makes it difficult to understand their relative importance. Diessel's study, however, discusses only temporal constructions and identifies iconicity of sequence as the strongest predictor of clause position. Since this explanation is, in principle, unavailable for other types of subordinate clauses, the generalizability of Diessel's findings is somewhat limited. The present study offers a multifactorial analysis of 2,000 concessive constructions from the written part of the BNC and assesses the variable importance of six factors for the ordering choice, showing that semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors are much stronger predictors of clause position than processing-based, weight-related ones. On a methodological note, the study proposes that random forests using conditional inference trees constitute the preferred tool for the general type of problem investigated here.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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Footnotes

1

We thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor Bas Aarts for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. All remaining errors are of course our own.

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