Syntax from and for Discourse : Adverbial Clauses as Item-Specific Constructions in Spontaneous Spoken English

Abstract This paper seeks to contribute to a usage- and construction-based approach to the complex sentence. Studying temporal adverbial clauses with before , after , until and once in spontaneous spoken English, it diverges from previous work [Diessel, Holger (2008). “The Iconicity of Sequence. A Multifactorial Analysis of Clause Order in Complex Sentences.” Cognitive Linguistics 19.3, 465–490.] by focussing especially on the functions and usage characteristics of configurations that are highly marked, i.e. on complex sentences in which the respective adverbial clause precedes its matrix and expresses an event-sequence in a non-iconic ordering ( before, until ). The paper is inspired by two longstanding claims from functionalist syntax and discourse analysis, viz. that discourse should be the starting point for any study of syntax and that initial adverbial clauses present constructions in their own right. It reports the first results of a corpus study (based on the BNC files with spontaneous spoken language) which substantiate the latter claim and also discusses some of the wider implications of these results for construction-based models of the complex sentence.