Kikusawa, Namiko (2011) Conditional if-clauses in Late Middle English prose texts. MPhil(R) thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2637/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/
[email protected] Conditional if-clauses in Late Middle English prose texts Namiko Kikusawa Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy Department of English Language Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow 2011 Abstract In this thesis, I am going to conduct a corpus-based analysis of if-clauses in fifteenth-century texts. The fifteenth century has generally been considered a crucial period for the evolution of this construction: a turning-point where the subjunctive starts to lose ground, being replaced by substitutional expressions such as the indicative and modal auxiliaries. The aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed description of if-clauses in the fifteenth century from both form-based and semantic viewpoints. In the form-based approach, by classifying examples into three categories, subjunctive, indicative and modals, two points will be examined: variation across genres and sociolects.