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Negative conditionals in English

A corpus analysis of register variation

ORCiD logo with link | Åbo Akademi University | University of Helsinki
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Abstract
This paper examines the register variation of negative conditionals in English. The main expression types for English negative conditionals are negative if-conditionals and unless-conditionals. These two constructions were studied in five registers of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that negative if-conditionals differ from unless-conditionals in several respects. Unless-conditionals contain few of the hallmarks of conditional constructions: they seldom appear in initial position, they shun the use of past tense or subjunctive morphology to indicate hypotheticality or counterfactuality, and their main clauses are almost never introduced by then. Different registers are found to be associated with differences in clause order, the syntactic rank of the clause, tense choice in both protasis and apodosis, and the polarity of the apodosis. There are also phraseological patterns that are highly register-specific, such as scalar if not or the if not for construction. The grammar of unless-conditionals is found to be less variable, and unless-conditionals also display less phraseological patterning. The findings highlight the interplay between register variation and degrees of schematicity.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Negative conditionals
    • 2.1Conditionals
    • 2.2If vs. unless
  • 3.Data, methods and analysis
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Data annotation
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overview
    • 4.2Grammatical patterns
      • 4.2.1Grammatical patterns of protases
      • 4.2.2Grammatical patterns of apodoses
    • 4.3Phraseological patterns
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • Corpus
  • References
References (49)
Corpus
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). March 2020 version. [URL]
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