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Conditionals in Political Texts

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Conditionals in Political Texts JOSIP JURAJ STROSSMAYER UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Adnan Bujak Conditionals in political texts A corpus-based study Doctoral dissertation Advisor: Dr. Mario Brdar Osijek, 2014 CONTENTS Abstract ...........................................................................................................................3 List of tables ....................................................................................................................4 List of figures ..................................................................................................................5 List of charts....................................................................................................................6 Abbreviations, Symbols and Font Styles ..........................................................................7 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................9 1.1. The subject matter .........................................................................................9 1.2. Dissertation structure .....................................................................................10 1.3. Rationale .......................................................................................................11 1.4. Research questions ........................................................................................12 2. Theoretical framework .................................................................................................13 2.1. Conditional sentence ............................................................................................13 2.2. Conditional construction ......................................................................................14 2.3. Basic description of conditionals ..........................................................................15 2.3.1 Verb phrase in the conditional construction .................................................16 2.3.2. Markers of protasis and apodosis ................................................................19 2.3.3. If or... .........................................................................................................19 2.3.4. Relationship between protasis and apodosis ................................................23 2.3.5. Clause order in the conditional construction ...............................................27 2.4. Historical overview of conditionals ......................................................................28 2.5. Classification of conditionals ...............................................................................35 2.5.1. Traditional division (0, I, II, III & Mix type) ..............................................38 2.5.2. Open vs. remote conditionals ......................................................................42 2.5.2.1. Open conditionals ....................................................................................43 2.5.2.2. Remote conditionals ................................................................................45 2.5.2.3. The notion of time in remote conditionals ................................................45 2.5.2.4. Verb forms in remote conditionals ...........................................................47 2.5.2.5. Open vs hypothetical conditionals ...........................................................49 2.5.3. Indicative vs. Subjunctive ...........................................................................50 2.5.4. Epistemic, speech-act and content conditionals ...........................................53 2.5.4.1. Epistemic conditionals .............................................................................53 2.5.4.2. Speech-act conditionals ...........................................................................54 2.5.5. Consequential vs. Non-consequential .........................................................56 2 2.5.5.1. Non-consequential conditionals ...............................................................58 2.5.6. Hypothetical, pragmatic and course-of-event conditionals ..........................59 2.5.7. Factual, hypothetical and relevance conditionals ........................................70 2.5.8. Predictive conditionals ...............................................................................74 2.5.9. Explicit or implicit conditional constructions .........................................................77 2.5.10.Alternative conditional constructions .........................................................80 2.6. Meaning in conditional constructions ....................................................................82 2.7. Degrees of hypotheticality ....................................................................................84 2.8. Mental spaces .......................................................................................................86 2.8.1. Mental spaces and conditional conjunctions ................................................89 2.8.2. Metalinguistic space ....................................................................................92 2.8.3. Epistemic stance ..........................................................................................92 2.9.Sufficient Conditionality Thesis .............................................................................93 2.10. Philosophical view of conditionals ......................................................................93 2.11.Conditionals in Logic ...........................................................................................96 2.12. What is political discourse? .....................................................................................98 3. Research analysis.........................................................................................................102 3.1. Discourse conditionals in the corpus .....................................................................112 4. Discussion ...................................................................................................................130 4.1. Research questions....................................................................................................130 4.1.1. RQ1 – What is the frequency of conditional clause in political discourse? ..........130 4.1.2. RQ2 – What is the difference in frequency of conditional clauses in American and European political discourse? ....................................................................132 4.1.3. RQ3 – What types of conditionals can be found in political discourse and what are the most common ones? ............................................................................135 4.1.4. RQ4 – What types of conditionals are the most influential ones in political discourse and why? ..................................................................................................136 4.1.5. RQ5 – What is the use of conditionals in political discourse? .................................136 5. Conclusions .................................................................................................................137 6. Appendix .....................................................................................................................140 7. References ..................................................................................................................166 3 ABSTRACT Conditionals proved to be a very interesting topic for various researches throughout history. They were the cause of many discussions in a number of scientific areas and have not been completely demystified yet. Conditionals are studied by linguists, philosophers, logicians, information technology (IT) scientists, and many others. The present dissertation presents another effort to present the background information about conditionals from linguistic but also from the viewpoint of logic and philosophy, because these disciplines very frequently overlap. The aim is also to present a different division of conditional construction from the various aspects as well as provide basic details about conditionals. Due to the very nature of this dissertation, political discourse was the base for research work and thus some attention, though not in detail, is paid to the political discourse. The research involved political press releases and public announcements from two different sources: the European Parliament and the White House. The reason for this was the desire to achieve diversity in sources and to notice any potential difference with respect to the use of conditionals across the two major regional varieties of English as far as political discourse is concerned. Furthermore, most attention was focused on the pragmatic conditional, and its subclass of discourse conditionals was the focus of the research due to its connections with the political discourse.Finally, this dissertation is an attempt to connect grammatical, philosophical, logical and political viewpoints of conditional constructions in the English language. Key words: conditionals, cognitive linguistics, political discourse, conditional construction, corpus research 4 List of tables Table 1 – Time relation between protasis and apodosis Table 2 – Progressive verbal forms in conditional constructions Table 3 – Verbal combinations in Rotingen's work Table 4 – Basic forms of Type 1 conditionals Table 5 – Basic forms of Type 2 conditionals Table 6 – Basic forms of Type 3 conditionals Table 7 – Mixed type conditionals‘ variation
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