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

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p> 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.</jats:p>

Adverbial Clauses in English Cookbooks

“…Since the adverbial clauses in English are useful to support the flow of information (Mala, 2005), it is intriguing to study these structures of adverbial clauses as to when and why one variant is chosen over the others. Previous studies were found to focus on adverbial clauses in formal texts (Chafe, 1984;Rezaee et al, 2018). This study, however, changes the focus to commercial cookbooks due to the rise of cookbook sales in recent years as cooking and entertaining at home has become increasingly popular (forbes.com).…”

“…Gustilo (2010) observed adverbial clauses written by non-native speakers, referring to Filipino ESL learners, and found that conditional adverbial clauses are at 75 percent as in (24a). On the other hand, Rezaee et al (2018) observed texts written by native speakers of English, determined by the authors' affiliation, and they found 67.7 percent of adverbial clauses of reason in (24b).…”