Abstract
In linguistics,if-clauses have attracted the interest of scholars working on syntax, typology and pragmatics alike. This article examinesif-clauses as a resource available to tour guides for reorienting the visitors’ visual attention towards an object of interest. The data stem from 11 video-recorded tours in Italian, French, German and Dutch (interpreted into Flemish Sign Language). In this setting, guides recurrently useif-clauses to organize a joint focus of attention, by soliciting the visitors to bodily and visually rearrange. These clauses occur in combination with verbs of vision (e.g.,to look), or relating to movement in space (e.g.,to turn around). Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study pursues three interrelated objectives: 1) it examines the grammatical relationship that speakers establish between theif-clause and the projected main clause; 2) it analyzes the embodied conduct of participants in the accomplishment ofif/then-constructions; 3) it describesif-clauses as grammatical resources with a twofold projection potential: a vocal-grammatical projection enabling the guide (or the addressees) to achieve a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which solicits visitors to accomplish a situationally relevant action, such as reorienting gaze towards an object of interest. These projections do not run independently from each other. The analysis shows how, while producing anif-clause, guides adjust their emerging talk—through pauses, expansions and restarts—to the visitors’ co-occurring spatial repositioning. These practices are described as micro-sequential adjustments that reflexively affect turn-construction and embodied compliance. In addressing the above phenomena and questions, this article highlights the fundamentally adaptive, situated and action-sensitive nature of grammar.
Highlights
Different labels have been used to account for the kinds of conditionality that seem to relate the protasis to the apodosis: Sweetser (1990) distinguished content conditionals
If-clauses produced with these features are projective in two ways: 1) They are projective with respect to grammar, in that they prosodically index turn-continuation, thereby making expectable a subsequent main clause (Auer, 2005; Auer, 2009; Deppermann and Streeck, 2018); they are heard as a protasis that makes relevant an apodosis, or as a first component of a compound turn-constructional unit (TCU) that projects a second component (Lerner, 1991); they project a vocal-grammatical continuation; 2) They are projective with respect to action, in that they make relevant an action to be carried out by the visitors; they are recognizable as first actions that make the accomplishment of a second action conditionally relevant (Goodwin, 2002; Schegloff, 2007), more precisely, an action that addressees have to carry out bodily
While from a grammatical perspective the protasis is produced as a canonical if-clause (“wenn wir uns den hals anschaun”/‘if we look at the neck’; l. 04), the format of what can be identified as the apodosis (“da sind so lange, (0.6) stangen dran”/‘there are like long bars attached’; ll. 05–06) has been described as a non-integrated main clause (Günthner, 1999; Günthner, 2020)
Summary
An if-clause is commonly described as a subordinate clause, or protasis, which is canonically followed by a -clause, the apodosis, with which it forms a conditional construction. Within functional linguistics, different labels have been used to account for the kinds of conditionality that seem to relate the protasis to the apodosis: Sweetser (1990) distinguished content conditionals (If Mary goes, John willIf-Clauses in Guided Tours go), from epistemic conditionals (If she’s divorced, () she’s been married), and from speech-act conditionals (If I may say so, that’s a crazy idea). Sweetser’s epistemic conditionals resonate with the way in which if-clauses are conceived of in logic (Frege, 1923; Gibbard, 1981; Krzyżanowska, 2015), where conditional reasoning is based on an antecedent (if) and a consequent (). Lerner’s (1991) interactional approach described the if-clause as the first component of a compound turn-constructional unit (TCU; Sacks et al, 1974): upon uttering the if-component, the speaker projects the relevance of a second component, the -component While these approaches pursue very different analytical goals and methodological procedures, they all seem to purport an understanding of if-clauses as forming the first part of a bipartite construction. If-clauses are recognizable as such from the onset of their production, since they are formed with particular conjunctions in clause- and TCU-initial position, such as se (Italian), si (French), wenn (German), and als (Dutch).3 In these languages, such TCU-beginnings enable speakers to display the syntactic trajectory of their turn-in-progress early on. The interactional import of if/-constructions has been described for various languages (English: Ford, 1997; German: Auer, 2000; Günthner, 1999; Günthner, 2020; Italian: Lombardi Vallauri, 2010; Finnish: Nissi, 2016 among many others), but researchers have focused exclusively on the ways in which if-clauses are dealt with in talk, whereas little is known about how such constructions are embedded in the interactants’ embodied conduct (but see Lindström et al, 2019)
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