This paper examines the so-called narrative use of before-clauses in English, as in They had hardly heard her explanation before Jack burst out crying. In such sentences the main situation is narrated by the before-clause, while the main clause offers contextual temporal specification of this situation. The attempt to cope with the descriptive challenge posed by this rather special balance of narrative impact between the two clauses takes its point of departure in Huddleston and Pullum’s (2002:1104) recognition of before as a “comparative governor” and in my findings in connection with a recent study on narrative when-clauses (Bache 2016). Narrative before-clauses are superficially very similar to temporal before-clauses (as in They heard her explanation before Jack called her parents), where the main situation is expressed by the main clause and the before-clause provides contextual temporal specification. However, narrative before-clauses are found to be not only pragmatically but also formally distinct from temporal before-clauses and therefore must be accommodated in our more general grammatical description of before. The basic approach to before as a comparative element goes some of the way to explain the special textual balance in narrative before-constructions, but it must be supplemented with the notion of “functional superordination” resulting from a special pattern of assertiveness, textual cohesion, and “main clause phenomena.” In the analysis of more than 7000 examples of before, the temporal-narrative distinction is found to be too crude. A new typology of constructions is therefore proposed which is sensitive to both formal criteria and textual strategies.

中文翻译：

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英语旁白

这篇论文研究了英语中所谓的前置从句的叙事用法，就像在杰克哭出来之前他们几乎没有听到她的解释一样。在这样的句子中，主要情况由前置子句叙述，而主要从句提供这种情况的上下文时间说明。Huddleston 和 Pullum (2002:1104) 承认 before 是“比较性支配者”，以及我的相关发现，试图应对这两个条款之间这种相当特殊的叙事影响平衡所带来的描述性挑战。最近对叙述性 when 子句的研究（Bache 2016）。Narrative before-clauses 表面上非常类似于temporal before-clauses（如在杰克打电话给她父母之前他们听到了她的解释），其中主要情况由主句表达，前句提供上下文时间规范。然而，我们发现叙述性前置子句不仅在语用上而且在形式上与时间前置子句不同，因此必须适应我们对 before 的更一般的语法描述。将之前作为比较元素的基本方法在一定程度上解释了叙事之前构建中的特殊文本平衡，但必须辅以“功能上的上级”概念，这种概念源于一种特殊的断言、文本衔接、和“主句现象”。在对之前 7000 多个例子的分析中，发现时间-叙述的区别过于粗略。