CONDITIONALS IN DISCOURSE: A TEXT-BASED STUDY FROM ENGLISH

Abstract

Editors' note . The discourse function of conditionals is a major concern in virtually every paper in this volume. Ford and Thompson's contribution is, however, the only one which analyses actual, rather than constructed or experimental, data. It sets out to test Haiman's (1978) hypothesis that conditionals are topics, and to ascertain similarities and differences in the function of conditionals depending on clause order. INTRODUCTION The literature on natural language conditionals, including many of the contributions to this volume, has contributed much to our understanding of the internal structure of conditional sentences and of their ‘meanings’. What has been less well discussed is the discourse function of conditionals. Two grammars of English are exceptions: Modern English by Marcella Frank (1972) and The grammar book by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman (1983), both of which begin to characterize conditionals with reference to their patterns of occurrence in discourse. Mead and Henderson (1983) also provide an enlightening discussion of conditionals in a particular context, looking at how they function in an economics textbook. Winter (1982) discusses some of the general factors involved in the positioning of various adverbial types, including conditionals. Linde looks at some of the factors which play a role in the positioning of if -clauses either before or after a main clause. Her basic finding is that, with the exception of certain irrealis if -clauses, the order of clauses does not ‘reverse the order of events in real time’ (Linde 1976: 280).