Iconicity of Sequence in American TV Series: With Focus on the Positioning of Temporal Adverbial Clauses

This study aimed to investigate the affectedness of iconicity of sequence on the positioning of after-clauses and before-clauses which express a pure temporal relationship with their main clauses. Iconicity of sequence has been considered as one of determinate factors affecting the positioning of clauses in the structures of complex sentences. The previous studies have suggested that the clause with an earlier-occurring event tend to appear sentence-initially while the clause with a later-occurring event is positioned sentence-finally. In order to examine the arrangement of clauses affected by iconicity of sequence in the contemporary use of English, this study employed a corpus for American television series viewed by native and non-native speakers of English around the world. The results show that iconicity of sequence works on the positioning of before-clauses to a considerable degree. On the other hand, the positioning of after-clauses is not heavily affected by iconicity of sequence although after-clauses describe an earlier-occurring event.