The discourse-pragmatic functions of if/si-constructions in English and Spanish spoken academic discourse
Although if/si constructions are usually defined as conditional constructions which exhibit cause-consequence paterns, prior research has evidenced that these constructions may fulfil a wider range of discourse-pragmatic functions. In addition, research delving into the uses and functions of these c...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repositorio: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/149194 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/11441/149194 https://doi.org/10.17710/soprag.2023.11.1.lastreslopez3 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Conditional construction Academic discourse Corpus linguistics Ideational Interpersonal Construcción condicional Discurso académico Lingüística de corpus Ideacional |
| Sumario: | Although if/si constructions are usually defined as conditional constructions which exhibit cause-consequence paterns, prior research has evidenced that these constructions may fulfil a wider range of discourse-pragmatic functions. In addition, research delving into the uses and functions of these constructions in specific registers is scarce and, moreover, few studies have adopted a contrastive perspective. This paper intends to fill thisgap by examining if/si constructions in English and Spanish in a comparable corpus of spoken academic discourse, a registerin which conditionals are frequent (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan, 1999, p. 824-825). The theoretucal framework is based on the three metafunctions proposed in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Mathiessen, 2014), allowing us to distinguish if/si-constructions at the ideational, interpersonal and textual levels. Data are drawn from the spoken academic subcorpora of the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) (Nelson, Wallis and Aarts, 2002) and of the Spanish component of the Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages (C-ORAL-ROM)(Cresti and Moneglia, 2005). Corpus data throw light on the use of these constructions in English and Spanish. Results show that conditionals are used differently in colloquial conversation and in spoken academic discourse. |
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