Ordering Distributions of Main and Adverbial Clauses in English and Chinese: A Contrastive Study

This article examines, from the perspective of linguistic typology, whether ordering distributions of main and adverbial clauses in English and Chinese conforms to Diessel's(2001)Hierarchy. It is found that both English and Chinese in general conform to it. The major difference between the two languages lies in that adverbial clauses tend to precede the main clause in Chinese, whereas they usually follow the main clause in English. Specifically, in Chinese, conditional, temporal and causal clauses precede the main clause more often than those of in English, especially temporal clauses denoting a prior event. A preliminary investigation finds that the position of adverbial clauses is in general consistent with the position of their adverbials in VO languages, which is an important factor contributing to different positional patterns (pre-or post-) of adverbial clauses in English and Chinese.