Discourse-Pragmatic and Processing-Related Motivators of the ordering of Reason Clauses in an Academic Corpus

Abbas A. Rezaee; Majid Nemati; Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar

doi:10.2478/rela-2018-0014

Authors

Abbas A. Rezaee University of Tehran, Iran
Majid Nemati University of Tehran, Iran
Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar University of Tehran, Iran

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/rela-2018-0014

Keywords:

positioning, reason clauses, subordinator, bridging, complexity

Abstract

The present research is aimed at examining the relative importance of the competing motivators of the sequencing of reason clauses in a corpus of research articles of applied linguistics. All the finite reason clauses accompanied by their main clauses in this corpus were collected. Random forest of conditional inference trees is the statistical modelling in this study. The findings showed that sentence-final reason clauses outnumber sentenceinitial ones. Moreover, subordinator choice and bridging, which are discourse-pragmatic constraints on clause positioning, emerged as the two more powerful predictors of the ordering of reason clauses in this corpus. Furthermore, the complexity of the clause turned out to be a stronger processing related predictor than the length of the clause.

References

Aarts, Bass. 1988. Clauses of Concession in Written Present-day British English. Journal of English Linguistics 2. 39–85.
Google Scholar

Arnold, Jennifer E., Losongco, Anthony, Thomas Wasow and Ryan Ginstrom. 2000. Heaviness vs. Newness: The Effects of Structural Complexity and Discourse Status on Constituent Ordering. Language 76(1). 28–55.
Google Scholar

Bever, Thomas G. 1970. The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures. In: John R. Hayes (ed), Cognition and the Development of Language, 279–362. Hoboken: Wiley.
Google Scholar

Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Gwoffrey, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Google Scholar

Birner, Betty J. and Gregory Ward. 1998. Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Google Scholar

Breiman, Leo. 2001. Random Forests. Machine Learning 45 (1). 5–32.
Google Scholar

Chafe, Wallace. 1984. How People Use Adverbial Clauses. Berkeley Linguistics Society 10. 437–49.
Google Scholar

Dahl, Östen. 2004. The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Google Scholar

Diessel, Holger. 2001. The Ordering Distribution of Main and adverbial Clauses: A typological Stud. Language 77 (3). 433–455.
Google Scholar

Diessel, Holger. 2005. Competing Motivations for the Ordering of Main and Adverbial Clauses. Linguistics 43 (3). 449–470.
Google Scholar

Diessel, Holger. 2008. Iconicity of Sequence: A Corpus-based Analysis of the Positioning of Temporal Adverbial Clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics 19 (3). 465–490.
Google Scholar

Ford, Cecilia E. 1993. Grammar in Interaction: Adverbial Clauses in American English Conversations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar

Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic Complexity: Locality of syntactic Dependencies. Cognition 68 (1). 1–76.
Google Scholar

Gibson, Edward. 2000. The Dependency Locality Theory: A Distance-based Theory of Linguistic Complexity. In: Alec Marantz, Yasushi Miyashita and Wayne O’Neil (eds.), Image, Language, Brain, 95–126. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Google Scholar

Givón, Talmy. 2001. Syntax: An Introduction. vol. 1. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Google Scholar

Givón, Talmy. 2011. Ute Reference Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Google Scholar

Greenbaum, Sidney and Gerald Nelson. 1996. Positions of Adverbial Clauses in British English. World Englishes 15 (1). 69–81.
Google Scholar

Hawkins, John. A. 1994. A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar

Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar

Hothorn, Torsten, Hornik, Kurt and Achim Zeileis. 2006. Unbiased Recursive Partitioning: A Conditional Inference Framework. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15 (3). 651–674.
Google Scholar

Iwasaki, Noriko. 2010. Style Shifts Among Japanese Learners Before and After Study Abroad in Japan: Becoming Active Social Agents in Japanese. Applied Linguistics 31 (1). 45–71.
Google Scholar

Kirk, John M. 1997. Subordinate Clauses in English. Journal of English Linguistics 25 (4). 349–364.
Google Scholar

Li, Ming and Vitányi, Paul. 1997. An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications. Heidelberg: Springer.
Google Scholar

Miestamo, Matti. 2006. On the feasibility of complexity metrics. In FinEst linguistics, proceedings of the annual Finnish and Estonian conference of linguistics, Tallinn, 11-26.
Google Scholar

Mukherjee, Joybrato. 2001. Principles of pattern selection. Journal of English linguistics 29 (4). 295-314.
Google Scholar

Quirk, Randolph. et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Google Scholar

Rezaee, Abbas Ali and Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar. 2016. The Sequencing of Adverbial Clauses of Time in Academic English: Random Forest Modelling. Journal of Language Modelling 4(2), 225-244.
Google Scholar

Rezaee, Abbas Ali and Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar. 2017. Conditional Inference Tree Modelling of Competing Motivators of the Positioning of Concessive Clauses: The Case of a Non-native Corpus. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 24(2-3), 89-106.
Google Scholar

Saif, Shahrzad. 2006. Aiming for Positive Washback: A Case Study of International Teaching Assistants. Language Testing 23 (1). 1-34.
Google Scholar

Schoonen, Rob. et al. 2011. Modelling the Development of L1 and EFL Writing Proficiency of Secondary School Students. Language learning 61(1). 31-79.
Google Scholar

Shizuka, Tetsuhito, Takeuchi, Osamu, Tomoko Yashima and Kiyomi Yoshizawa. 2006. A Comparison of Three-and Four-Option English Tests for university Entrance Selection Purposes in Japan. Language Testing 23 (1). 35-57.
Google Scholar

Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Harald R. Baayen. 2012. Models, Forests, and Trees of York English: Was/were Variation as a Case Study for Statistical Practice. Language Variation and Change 24 (2). 135–178.
Google Scholar

Thompson, Sandra A., Rober A. Longacre, and Shin Ja J. Hwang. 2007. Adverbial Clauses. In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 237–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar

Thompson, Sandra A. 1985. Grammar and Written Discourse. Initial and Final Purpose Clauses in English. In: Talmy Givón (ed.), Quantified Studies in Discourse. Special Issue of Text, 5, 55–84.
Google Scholar

Trude, Alison M. and Natasha Tokowicz. 2011. Negative Transfer from Spanish and English to Portuguese Pronunciation: The Roles of Inhibition and Working Memory. Language Learning 61(1). 259-280.
Google Scholar

Vandepitte, Sonia. 1993. A Pragmatic Study of the Expression and the Interpretation of Causality: Aonjuncts and Conjunctions in Modern Spoken British English. Brussel: Paleis der Academiën.
Google Scholar

Vafaee, Payman, Basheer, Nesrine and Reese Heitner. 2012. Application of Confirmatory Factor Analysis in Construct Validity Investigation: The Case of the Grammar Sub-Test of the CEP Placement Exam. Iranian Journal of Language Testing 2 (1). 1-19.
Google Scholar

Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. 2004. Initial and Final Position for Adverbial Clauses in English: The Constructional Basis of the Discursive and Syntactic Differences. Linguistics 42 (4). 819–853.
Google Scholar

Vulanovic, Relja. 2007. On Measuring Language Complexity as Relative to the Conveyed Linguistic Information. SKY Journal of Linguistics 20. 399–427.
Google Scholar

Wasow, Thompson. 2002. Postverbal Behavior. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Google Scholar

Wiechmann, Daniel and Kerz, Elma. 2013. The Positioning of Concessive Adverbial Clauses in English. English Language and Linguistics 17. 1–22.
Google Scholar