Subordination in Written and Oral discourse

The paper presents a comprehensive formal and functional corpus-based description of subordinate clauses as well as the results of the analysis of their distribution in different contexts (a corpus of four different text types of different degrees of formality). The aim of this study was to describe the syntactic structures and investigate how they are used within different naturally occurring texts of spoken and written discourse. The study investigates the ways in which nominal, relative, and adverbial subordinate clauses occur and what functions they serve.  The results of the analysis presented in the study show that written language consists of longer sentences and more complex structures with subordinate clauses. The analysis also revealed that distinctions are more likely to be found between text types which indicate the function of the text rather than between its concrete manifestations - the medium. Finally, the obtained data were compared with those from other corpora presented in previous quantitative studies based on the LSWE corpus.