A functional-pragmatic approach to if/si-constructions in English, French and Spanish: A corpus-based study

Abstract

This thesis explores if/si-constructions in English, French and Spanish, from a functional-pragmatic and corpus-based perspective. The analysis comprises both conditional constructions and cases of insubordination introduced by the same conjunctions, with the belief that the examination of both types of constructions in parallel will offer new light on their characterization. The theoretical framework proposed is based on the three metafunctions distinguished in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and the data analysed are retrieved from parliamentary discourse and conversations corpora in the three languages.