Adverbial Clauses order in Persian

This article through studying the adverbial clauses order in Persian intends to show its relation with semantics, discourse, weight and iconicity. To do this, 1343 complex sentences including six semantic subtypes, i.e. temporal, conditional, causal, purposive, resultive and manner clauses, were selected. Statistical analysis based on corpus data from spoken and written Persian proved that the adverbial clauses exhibit a mixed pattern of pre- and postposing, although they often tend to precede the main clause. It was also shown that three of the four above-mentioned factors, namely semantics, discourse and iconicity influence the position of adverbial clauses. Semantics is the most important of competing forces, to be followed by iconicity which is especially effective on initial clauses. Weight, on the other hand, proved to be of no significance in the sequence of adverbial clauses.