Conditionality and the verbal mood in Spanish phraseological units

Conditional constructions establish a relationship between two semantic representations that is situated halfway causality and concessiveness. Causation corresponds to the actual motivation of an effect, while concessiveness can be understood mainly as an inefficient causality. In theory, conditionality refers to the field of logical implication, but it materializes in languages as a series of diverse pragmasemantic functions: making hypotheses about the future in possible worlds, metadiscursively modalizing sentences, pragmatically mitigating the cost of orders and advices through formulas of courtesy, topicalizing a part of the two-members structure, etc. The mode of the verb plays a relevant role in most of these cases, especially in determining whether factual, hypothetical or counterfactual values, among other factors. Here different relationships will be studied between some Spanish phraseological units (idioms, proverbs, conventional sayings…) and the various modalities of conditionality, as they characterize some frequent uses in Spanish. As for the proverbs, they frequently make future predictions (for example those of a meteorological nature) or set themselves the task of advising in the moral or practical order through prescriptive statements that may have a pragmatic cost for the speaker. As for the phrases or idioms that contain conditional elements, whether they are fixed as structures or in the process of grammaticalization, these units act as connectors or other types of discourse markers. In this way they contribute to establishing and making recognizable certain characteristic grammatical constructions of Spanish. Other times, finally, they are autonomous expressions that constitute conversational routines in the current language and that have acquired a certain degree of conventionalization.