Motivations for Using Non-Initial Conditionals and Their Pragmatical Functions

Abstract

There has been a lack of attention to the order of conditional clauses and resultant clauses in the study of conditional sentences in the Chinese research field. One commonality of human languages is that the conditional clause precedes the resultant clause. Previous researchers have given comprehensive explanations for the predominant antecedent order of initial conditional clauses, but there is still a research gap concerning the motivations for using non-initial conditionals and their pragmatical functions. With the help of the corpus, this paper focuses on the phenomenon of non-initial conditionals and explores the motivation for using them and their pragmatic functions. The current study finds that there are 2 main motivations for the use of non-initial conditional clauses, namely, to maintain discourse coherence and to act as post hoc complements; there are four main pragmatic functions of non-initial conditionals: boundary function, assessment function, euphemism function, and supplementary function. Similar microscopic studies help us reconceptualize conditional sentences’ actual role in communication to further reveal the dynamic nature of natural language communication.