If-insubordination in spoken British English: Syntactic and pragmatic properties

Abstract

This paper analyses insubordinate if-clauses in spoken British English (e.g. If you'll just come next door) as independent from full conditional clauses and indirect interrogative complement clauses, using data extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English and the British National Corpus. The study shows that such constructions occur most frequently in conversation and that they express a wide variety of functions in discourse. The polyfunctionality of insubordinate if-clauses is presented together with other, alternative grammatical patterns that may express the same function in discourse. The analysis also reveals a correlation between the discourse function of the clause and the type of verb (modal or lexical) used in it.