If-clauses in English and their Spanish and French equivalents : a contrastive corpus-based study

Abstract

This investigation aims to fill in this gap by providing a quantitative corpus-based analysis of if-clauses in spoken English, Spanish and French. Part I provides a review of the literature on if-clauses and their Spanish and French equivalents, in which English serves as point of departure and a number of features are isolated as tertium comparationis in order to be able to compare and contrast these constructions across the three languages under analysis. The approach followed is an eclectic one, based on reference grammars and more specific studies on the topic, which broadly can be said to share a discourse-functional perspective on language description. After eliciting our research questions, as well as the methodology used, Part II discusses the contrastive results obtained from a corpus-based analysis taking into account syntactic, semantic and functional considerations. The data have been extracted from the spoken academic components of the International Corpus of English-Great Britain (ICE-GB) (Nelson, Wallis, & Aarts, 2002), for English; and for Spanish and French, on the other hand, from the corresponding sub-corpora of the Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages (C-ORAL-ROM) (Cresti & Moneglia, 2005). The academic register has been chosen as object of analysis because, according to such previous studies as Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan (1999 [2000]: 824) and Carter-Thomas and Rowley-Jolivet (2008: 191) if-clauses are frequent in this particular genre in order to introduce or develop arguments, or to “present information that is generally or habitually the case” (Yule, 1998: 127). The findings resulting from this corpus-based investigation enable us to determine whether such claims hold true across the three languages under inspection. The study closes with some concluding remarks and presents new venues for research hoping to have raised awareness about the relevance of if-clauses – their implications and applications in language teaching and learning, in particular