What is it about?
Sometimes we choose to say 'Because he loved her, he came back' over 'He came back because he loved her'; or 'If you promise to help me, I'll give the information you want' over 'I'll give you the information you want if you promise to help me'. What is the difference between the two cases? Why do we sometimes opt to place 'because'-clauses or 'if'-clauses at the beginning of our sentence? This is the question that the paper addresses and the answer lies somewhere in the rhetorical needs of the speaker.
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Why is it important?
The linguistic phenomenon under investigation is important from a rhetorical perspective. Speakers tend to use it to enhance their chances of successfully manipulating the hearer. Interestingly, speakers rarely use this phenomenon consciously, hearers are hardly ever aware of it, and linguists have so far overlooked it.
Perspectives
The paper discusses the communicative/rhetorical function of pre-posed subordinate clauses, picking up where functional linguists left off. In this sense, it also intends to solve problems raised in information structure/functional linguistics.
Dr Valandis Bardzokas
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Procedural structures: The case of sentence-initial subordinate clauses, Journal of Pragmatics, August 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.06.007.
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