Conditionals and clause order

This article aims to shed new light on our understanding of the role of clause-order choice in conditionals by presenting an account of the construction of postposed -myen sentences in Korean. The article argues, unlike Lee (1996), that speakers of Korean have a choice of clause order in conditionals in spoken discourse, and they are motivated to postpose the -myen clauses for diverse discourse-functional reasons, such as to make the discourse structure and flow smooth, interactive, and coherent to the hearer. This study strongly implies that conditionals should be understood in the context of a dynamic interaction between the speaker and the hearer in the flow of discourse as their syntactic form interacts with diverse dynamic discourse factors.