On complex sentences with a commentative conditional clause

Abstract

In contemporary Serbian, besides prototypical complex sentences with a conditional clause, there are several types of complex sentences with a conditional clause which has a primarily commentative function: Na otvaranje izlozbe doslo je dva desetak ljudi, ako ih je bilo i toliko (At the exhibition opening, there were some twenty people, if that many); Ukoliko dobro pamtim, bagrem je prosle godine cvetao rano (If I remember well, acacias blossomed early last year), etc. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the syntactic structure of complex sentences of this type, to identify their syntactic and semantic subtypes, and to explore and describe their discourse functions.