Focus on the irrefutable. A closer look at the main clause of the Russian universal concessive conditional

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the main clause of a type of concessive construction usually referred to as a universal concessive conditional. The main clause of a Russian universal concessive conditional typically contains a strong or even irrefutable statement, which goes against the expectations of the hearer. In the literature it has been attested that the main clause of this construction typically contains contrastive markers, such as vse-taki ‘nevertheless’, and universal quantifiers (e.g. vsegda ‘always’, nikogda ‘never’). Our data show that these two markers are only found in a minority of cases. Since counter-expectation and contrast are the central elements of the construction, we may expect other operators that are related to the notion of polarity to be found in the main clause, such as aspectual markers (e.g. esce ‘still’), modal operators (e.g. dolžen ‘must’), focus particles (e.g. tol’ko ‘only’), comparative quantifiers (e.g. bol’se ‘more’), or negation. We will describe the use of these elements based on a synchronic corpus study and account for their contribution to the meaning of the construction as a whole and to the pragmatic function of the universal concessive conditional construction.