Schedule 80. StuTS

It has long been claimed that subordination is more common in writing (Chafe 1982: 35–52; Ong 1982: 36–38; inter alia). Furthermore, in languages with a long written tradition this frequency is increased in spoken language. A more recent claim is that such languages also employ a larger number of subordination markers in spoken language (Dąbrowska 2020: 87–88). This study examines the frequency of subordination and markers thereof in three phylogenetically and areally diverse languages without a written tradition. These are Goemai (Chadic, Nigeria), Hoocąk (Siouan, USA), and Komnzo (Yam, Papua New Guinea). For this, spoken language data is used. As a secondary objective, the study investigates adverbial subordination in spoken English, a language with a long written tradition and compares it to the numbers in Goemai, Hoocąk, and Komnzo. The results of the study show that these latter three languages differ heavily in the frequency of subordination. Here, a written tradition could not be confirmed to have a major impact. This is also the case when comparing the three languages to English. Other factors such as morphological complexity might play a larger role. The picture is more complex when it comes to the number of subordination markers. Goemai, Hoocąk, and Komnzo employ a similar number of markers. Yet the internal distribution of the markers differs. The image remains largely the same when only looking at adverbial subordination. There however, English does employ the largest number of markers. Yet, the number is less than half of what was reported in the literature and the majority of markers are only very marginally used. Here, there seems to be an impact. However, other factors as well as the asymmetry in research conducted on the individual languages may play a role.