Chapter 11

Morphosyntactic and pragmatic variation in conditional constructions in English and Spanish parliamentary discourse

This chapter explores conditional constructions introduced by if and si in British English and European Spanish parliamentary discourse, with data drawn from the Hansard Corpus of the British parliament and the Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados of the Spanish parliament. I propose a categorisation of conditionals according to the metafunctions set out by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), in order to encompass prototypical and less prototypical uses of these constructions. Corpus findings indicate that in addition to their prototypical use in expressing cause–consequence relations, conditionals in parliamentary discourse also function, to a lesser extent, as interpersonal and textual devices, especially in Spanish. Results also suggest a correlation between pragmatic and morphosyntactic variation in some of these constructions.