Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive, interactional and typological perspectives, and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use, as an interactional resource available to language users, in both written and spoken language.

‘Subordination’ versus ‘Coordination’ in Sentence and Text

The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination, in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination - or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization - at the discourse level.

This book presents a typology of subordination systems across the world's languages. Traditional definitions of subordination are based on morphosyntactic criteria, such as clausal embedding or non-finiteness.

The book shows that these definitions are untenable in a cross-linguistic perspective, and provides a cognitively based definition of subordination.