10.18710/SIPOUV Hampe, Beate Beate Hampe https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2884-9677 University of Erfurt Gries, Stefan Th. Stefan Th. Gries https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6497-3958 University of California at St. Barbara DataverseNO 2025 Arts and Humanities temporal adverbial clauses usage-based models complex-sentence constructions meso-constructions cognitive corpus linguistics multinomial regression English complex sentences subordination British National Corpus adverbial clauses construction grammar University of Erfurt University of California at St. Barbara The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) Hampe, Beate Beate Hampe University of Erfurt 2019-03-06 2025-01-15 corpus data 10.1515/GCLA-2018-0006 10.18710/SIPOUV/DIDKI8 10.18710/SIPOUV/UYKYRT 10.18710/SIPOUV/W7IAL5 45381 161733 12243 text/plain text/plain text/plain 1.0 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. <p><b>Dataset abstract:</b> The corpus files employed are a subset of 812 files containing spoken language from the British National Corpus (World edition, Oct. 2000) capturing British English in the late 20th century. For a description of the corpus, see <a href="http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/archive/worldURG/index.xml">http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/archive/worldURG/index.xml</a>. A total of 740 files were chosen because their meta data marked them as belonging to one of the following genres: broadcast discussion; classroom; consultation; conversation; demonstration; interview; interview or oral history; meeting; parliament; public debate; tutorial; spoken unclassified. To these, we added 72 files with the genre descriptions: courtroom; speech unscripted; sports live. </p><p>From these files with spoken British English, all occurrences of adverbial clauses exhibiting one of the four subordinating conjunctions ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘once’, and ‘until’ were extracted. For the final analysis, 8 samples of equal size (together comprising 560 tokens) were created from this output by narrowing down the corpus output to sentence configurations with adverbial clauses with these conjunctions in either initial or final position, by retaining only complex sentence configurations showing both the adverbial clause and a matrix, and by finally selecting only 1 token per file following a randomizer. The size of each of the subsets (70 tokens) was dictated by the frequency of the most infrequent configuration (initial until-clauses). </p> <p></p><b>Article abstract:</b> This paper presents a direct continuation of preceding corpus-linguistic research on complex sentence constructions with temporal adverbial clauses in a cognitive and usage-based framework (Diessel 2008; Hampe 2015). Working towards a more systematic construction-based account of complex sentences with before-, after-, until- and once-clauses in spontaneously spoken English, Hampe (2015) hypothesised that the morpho-syntactic realisations of configurations with initial adverbial clauses systematically diverge from those of configurations with final ones as a reflection of the specific functionality of each and that usage properties that are found across instantiations with a coherent functional load are retained in the schematisations creating constructions. This paper employs a multinomial regression in order to test to which extent each of eight closely related complex-sentence constructions with either initial or final before-, after-, until- and once-clauses can be predicted from the realisation of a few key morpho-syntactic properties of the respective adverbial and matrix clauses involved. The results support an analysis of complex-sentence constructions as meso-constructions that are not only specific about the subordinator and the positioning of the adverbial clause, but also retain “traces” of characteristic usage properties. Antconc, 3.2.1