Beyond conditionality: On the pragmaticalization of interpersonal if-constructions in English conversation

Abstract

This article explores if-constructions in face-to-face conversation, using data extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English. The study proposes a functional-pragmatic approach to analyse the uses and functions of if-constructions and suggests a path of pragmaticalization in which conditionals move beyond their prototypical ideational function and come to express interpersonal functions in discourse. Such path of pragmaticalization is also argued to lie behind the possible development of insubordinated if-clauses and of pragmatic markers introduced by if. Corpus results show the great diversity of functions that if-constructions have in conversation and reveal that pragmaticalized types of conditionals outnumber prototypical cause-consequence conditionals in conversation. The analysis also shows that certain morphosyntactic features traditionally associated with conditionals, such as the presence of a modal verb in the apodosis or the occurrence of the if-clause in sentence-initial position, only correlate with the most prototypical conditionals, a finding which is interpreted as an indication of the decategorialization of certain if-constructions