Abstract
The aim of the present paper was to determine the amount of variation in the placement of four types of temporal adverbial clauses in Czech and to identify factors that influence clause order. A sample of sentences containing one of the four connectives než, předtím než (both 'before'), poté co, až (both 'after') was extracted from a corpus of written Czech. 500 sentence were sampled for each of the connectives.
On the whole, adverbial clauses tend to follow the head clause. Furthermore, three factors were identified to influence the position of the adverbial clause in logistic regression.
Iconicity, status of the head clause (main or subordinate clause), and relative length of the subordinate clause were identified as significant predictors of clause order in the analysis. Longer clauses as well as clauses the heads of which are themselves a dependent of another clause are more strongly associated with postposition.
In addition, 'before' clauses are also more strongly associated with postposition. This may be interpreted as an effect of iconicity: other things being equal the 'before' clauses prefer postposition; just as the event expressed by these follows the main clause event in reality.
To follow up on this finding, preliminary results of an exploratory study aimed to assess the role of iconicity in sentence processing will be presented. In a self-paced reading experiment participants will be presented sentences beginning with a 'before' or an 'after' clause.
I will look for differences in reading times at clause boundaries. If iconicity plays a role in processing, 'after' clauses in initial position will facilitate processing, compared to (non-iconic) 'before' clauses.