---
title: "advcl: adverbial clause modifier — definition and key papers"
description: "advcl (adverbial clause modifier) is the Universal Dependencies relation that attaches a subordinate clause to a predicate it modifies."
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---
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# 🌐 advcl: adverbial clause modifier

Universal Dependencies · 6 key papers · [all concepts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/)

Part of: [🗨️ Natural language processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/natural-language-processing/) · [🌐 Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/universal-dependencies/)

advcl (adverbial clause modifier) is the Universal Dependencies relation that attaches a subordinate clause to a predicate it modifies. The clause works like an adverbial and expresses circumstances such as time, cause, condition, purpose, concession or manner.

Also: adverbial clause modifier, advcl:relcl, advcl:cmp

## What it is

In [Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/universal-dependencies/) (UD), a sentence is a tree of typed relations between words. Content words act as heads, and function words such as auxiliaries and prepositions depend on them ([Marneffe et al. 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2021-universal-dependencies/)).

The label advcl links two predicates:

- The head is the predicate of the clause being modified. This is usually the main verb, but it can be an adjective or noun when that word carries the predication.
- The dependent is the predicate of the adverbial clause.
- The subordinator itself (because, when, if) hangs from the dependent as mark.

A copula never serves as head, because the predicate word heads its clause. That is why pairs like VERB → ADJ also occur.

The relation descends from the Universal Stanford Dependencies, which UD adopted as its starting typology ([Marneffe et al. 2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2014-universal-stanford-dependencies-cross-linguistic/)). In UD the label tells you what kind of dependent is attached. Clauses denote events and modifiers specify them, so advcl says "a clause in a modifying role" ([Marneffe et al. 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2021-universal-dependencies/)).

Two design axes separate advcl from its neighbours ([Nivre et al. 2016](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2016-universal-dependencies-v1-multilingual-treebank/)):

- Phrase versus clause. advcl is the clausal counterpart of advmod.
- Core argument versus other dependent. Adverbial clauses are non-core, which separates them from complement clauses (Zeman 2017).

| Relation | Dependent | Attaches to |
| --- | --- | --- |
| advcl | clause, modifier | predicate |
| advmod / obl | adverb / nominal | predicate |
| ccomp / xcomp | clause, core complement | predicate |
| acl, acl:relcl | clause | nominal |

Languages may add subtypes but not new basic categories ([Nivre et al. 2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2020-universal-dependencies-v2-evergrowing-multilingual/)). Some treebanks use advcl:relcl for relative clauses that modify a whole clause, and advcl:cmp for comparative clauses.

The enhanced representation for English adds the marker to the relation label (nmod:after is one example), and the same mechanism extends to clausal modifiers ([Schuster & Manning 2016](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schuster-2016-enhanced-english-universal-dependencies-improved/)).

## Examples

In the sentences below, the dependent is in brackets and the arrow runs from head to dependent.

1. She left early [because she was tired]. advcl(left → tired). The word tired heads its clause because the copula was depends on it. because is mark(tired).
2. [If it rains], we will stay home. advcl(stay → rains), with mark(rains → If).
3. He read the letter, [smiling]. advcl(read → smiling). This is a non-finite clause with no marker.

Compare "the letter [that he read]", which is acl:relcl on letter. Compare also "I know [that he left]", which is ccomp on know.

## Across languages

UD aims for parallel annotation across typologically very different languages ([Marneffe et al. 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2021-universal-dependencies/)). Languages differ mainly in how they mark the adverbial clause:

- English and French mostly use a subordinating conjunction before a finite clause (because, quand, si) or a non-finite form. French uses the gérondif for this, as in "en marchant".
- Turkic languages, Japanese and others rely on converbs and case-marked verbal nouns. These are also annotated as advcl, and the morphology carries what a conjunction would carry elsewhere.
- Clauses without an ordinary verbal predicate are harder to fit into the scheme. Nonprototypical predication has received separate treatment (Nivre et al. 2026).
- More broadly, these choices can be seen as language-specific strategies for one shared construction (Nivre 2025).

In the current English and French treebanks, advcl covers a little over one percent of tokens. Verb-to-verb links dominate in both languages, and adjective-headed links come second. French also shows a noticeable share of nouns heading adverbial clauses, typically nominal predicates in copular sentences.

## In treebanks and research

UD grew from a few treebanks into a collection covering more than a hundred languages ([Marneffe et al. 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2021-universal-dependencies/)). It supplied the data for the CoNLL 2017 and 2018 shared tasks on parsing raw text ([Nivre et al. 2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2020-universal-dependencies-v2-evergrowing-multilingual/)).

advcl is a known source of difficulty in [dependency parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/dependency-parsing/), for three reasons:

- Attachment height is ambiguous. In a sentence with several clauses, it is often unclear which predicate the adverbial clause modifies.
- The boundary with neighbouring labels is fuzzy. advcl can be confused with xcomp, with conj, and with acl when the clause is non-finite.
- Annotation varies across treebanks. Annotation-consistency studies find such boundary cases among the places where UD corpora diverge ([Marneffe et al. 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2017-assessing-annotation-consistency-universal-dependencies/)).

For downstream tasks such as [semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/semantic-role-labeling/) and relation extraction, the enhanced graphs are especially useful. Marker-specific labels and propagated subjects make the link between a subordinate verb and its arguments explicit ([Schuster & Manning 2016](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schuster-2016-enhanced-english-universal-dependencies-improved/)). Practical introductions to the guidelines and tools cover these conventions for newcomers (Zeman 2021).

See also [treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/), syntax, [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) and [French](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/french/).

How often the relation advcl occurs: its share of all tokens Counted by code over the Universal Dependencies 2.18 treebanks of English and French (every token once, subtypes with their base relation).

**The numbers**

| Treebanks | Share |
| --- | --- |
| English treebanks | 1.34% of tokens (15,149 tokens) |
| French treebanks | 1.41% of tokens (15,383 tokens) |

What advcl joins: the most frequent head tag → dependent tag The five most frequent in each language's treebanks, by tokens.

**The numbers**

| Pair | Tokens |
| --- | --- |
| English: VERB → VERB | 10,121 |
| English: ADJ → VERB | 1,299 |
| English: VERB → ADJ | 685 |
| English: VERB → NOUN | 567 |
| English: ADV → VERB | 539 |
| French: VERB → VERB | 11,638 |
| French: ADJ → VERB | 1,061 |
| French: VERB → ADJ | 587 |
| French: NOUN → VERB | 530 |
| French: VERB → NOUN | 450 |

## Key papers

The works this page cites, the most cited first; citations as counted by OpenAlex plus the papers of this library that cite the work, read 2026-10-24.

- [Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2016-universal-dependencies-v1-multilingual-treebank/) — Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter et al. · 2016 · 1,741 citations
- [Universal Stanford dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2014-universal-stanford-dependencies-cross-linguistic/) — Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Timothy Dozat, Natalia Silveira et al. · 2014 · 627 citations
- [Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2021-universal-dependencies/) — Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre et al. · 2021 · 480 citations
- [Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schuster-2016-enhanced-english-universal-dependencies-improved/) — Sebastian Schuster, Christopher D. Manning · 2016 · 336 citations
- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2020-universal-dependencies-v2-evergrowing-multilingual/) — Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter et al. · 2020 · 325 citations
- [Assessing the Annotation Consistency of the Universal Dependencies Corpora](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2017-assessing-annotation-consistency-universal-dependencies/) — Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Matias Grioni, Jenna Kanerva et al. · 2017 · 30 citations

## Related concepts

- [Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/universal-dependencies/) — Universal Dependencies is a framework and an open collection of treebanks that annotates the grammar of many languages with one shared…
- [Dependency parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/dependency-parsing/) — Dependency parsing is the task of recovering a sentence's syntactic structure as directed, labelled links between its words. Each word is…

## More papers

Topics: [🌐 Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/universal-dependencies/) · [🌳 Dependency parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dependency-parsing/)

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