Als dan or dan als? Preferences in the order of clauses in Dutch conditional sentences.

What is it about?

In Dutch, as in many other languages, conditional sentences (of the form "if..., then..." or "als..., dan..." in Dutch) occur in two different types: the clause containing the condition ("if"/"als") can come first and the clause describing the result ("then"/"dan") second, but it can also happen that speakers reverse the order of these clauses. The article shows that there seem to be at least two factors influencing speakers' preference for one over the other order: the content of the conditional and the prior context.

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Why is it important?

Investigating preferences in conditional clause order is interesting, because it touches upon the more general question of why we use conditionals the way we do. Changing the clause order does not impact the literal meaning of the conditional sentence in any way, which suggests that speakers take more into account than just semantics when constructing conditionals.