As widely used in natural language,adverbial clauses can convey various semantic meanings with their flexible position.This study chooses the Corpus of Translational English(COTE)and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British...As widely used in natural language,adverbial clauses can convey various semantic meanings with their flexible position.This study chooses the Corpus of Translational English(COTE)and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English(FLOB)as the research corpora to examine the distribution of adverbial clauses of time,place,reason,condition,and concession in COTE and FLOB across different text categories.Results indicate that although adverbial clauses are mainly placed after the main clause in both translational and original English,translational English shows a lower tendency to put adverbial clauses after the main clauses.A few variations in the position of adverbial clauses are observed based on the subordinating conjunctions and the text categories.This research further discusses the factors influencing the position of adverbial clauses,mainly focusing on iconicity of time,iconicity of space,and Mean Dependency Distance(MDD).The findings show that all three factors can be regarded as significant factors,which can be explained by conceptual order,implicit meaning,and working memory load,and also proposed other potential factors.展开更多
文摘As widely used in natural language,adverbial clauses can convey various semantic meanings with their flexible position.This study chooses the Corpus of Translational English(COTE)and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English(FLOB)as the research corpora to examine the distribution of adverbial clauses of time,place,reason,condition,and concession in COTE and FLOB across different text categories.Results indicate that although adverbial clauses are mainly placed after the main clause in both translational and original English,translational English shows a lower tendency to put adverbial clauses after the main clauses.A few variations in the position of adverbial clauses are observed based on the subordinating conjunctions and the text categories.This research further discusses the factors influencing the position of adverbial clauses,mainly focusing on iconicity of time,iconicity of space,and Mean Dependency Distance(MDD).The findings show that all three factors can be regarded as significant factors,which can be explained by conceptual order,implicit meaning,and working memory load,and also proposed other potential factors.
