Variably future-marked conditionals in Greek
Integrating discourse and grammar
Kiki Nikiforidou | University of Athens & The Pennsylvania State University
It has been proposed that future-marked conditionals have discourse-pragmatic functions other than future temporal reference (Comrie 1982, Fillmore 1990, Dancygier & Sweetser 2005). Through a corpus-based multivariate analysis we show that future-marked conditionals in Greek are associated with speech-act conditional uses and correlate systematically with formal contextual features of polarity and subject-person and form. We argue that some of these associations are entrenched enough to warrant constructional status and that the data support the emergence of specific conditional constructions, on a continuum between fixed formulas and schematic or more productive constructions, defined by particular tense-aspect combinations, preferred lexical fillers, and specialized functions, which are really of a discoursal nature. We suggest that construction grammar provides an appropriate framework for integrating discourse-pragmatic conventions, not merely semantics, into grammatical theory; we further propose some attributes and values that may be used for this purpose.
Keywords: bi-clausal constructions, construction grammar, politeness, discourse frames, speech-act conditionals, Greek, topics, multivariate analysis, conditionals
Published online: 30 July 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.2.1.04nik
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.2.1.04nik
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
No author info given
Enghels, Renata & María Sol Sansiñena
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.