Mood selection in Czech and Russian if-then constructions

Abstract

Czech and Russian have similar morphosyntactic resources to express conditionality in complex sentences. In spite of such formal similarities, there are significant differences in mood selection between Czech and Russian. The author of this paper argues that, in addition to notions such as time, degrees of hypotheticality and the speaker's epistemic stance, further dimensions are necessary to describe the functions of the conditional and indicative moods in if-then constructions in the two languages: the relationship between the condition and the consequent, the notion of alternative worlds, and the speaker's perspective with respect to these alternative worlds.