A Corpus-Based Study on Figure Precedence in English Complex Sentences
Mikyung Lee · The Journal of Linguistics Science · 2020
This study aims to verify the affectedness of the Figure Precedence Principle in the structures of complex sentences based on COCA"s recent data. The results of this study showed that the Figure Precedence Principle works at different levels of affectedness in each semantic type of adverbial clause. The complex sentences with the causal clause are under the most significant affectedness of the Figure Precedence Principle. On the other hand, complex sentences with a conditional clause have the weakest affectedness of the Figure Precedence Principle. It is remarkable that complex sentences with a concessive clause have an opposite preference to figure precedence between the spoken and the written data.