Are subordinate clauses more typical of languages with a long literary tradition than integral features of human speech?
” Contemporary linguists tend to assume in their work that subordinate clauses, such as “The boy that I saw yesterday” or “I knew what happened when she came down the steps”, are an integral part of the innate linguistic endowment, and/or central features of “human speech” writ large. Most laymen would assume the same thing. However, the fact is that when we analyze a great many strictly spoken languages with no written tradition, subordinate clauses are rare to nonexistent. In many Native American languages, for example, the only way to express something like the men who were members is a clause which parses approximately as “The ‘membering’ men”; the facts are similar in thousands of other languages largely used orally. In fact, even in earlier documents in today’s “tall building” literary languages, one generally finds a preference for stringing simple main clauses together she came down the steps, and I knew what happened rather than embedding them in one another along the lines of
