Insubordinate if-clauses in FDG: Degrees of independence

Abstract

Abstract The so-called insubordinate clauses have received an increasing amount of attention in recent years in a wide variety of typologically different languages and from different analytical perspectives. This article concerns itself with one particular type of insubordination, namely insubordinate if-clauses (e.g. If you’ll just come next door, if you hadn’t noticed, if I may ask). So far, the extensive literature on these clauses has concentrated mainly on their discourse-pragmatic functions, their degree of autonomy, and their degree of conventionalization. Relatively little work has been done on the formal (syntactic and prosodic) features of these clauses, nor on the relationship between these formal features and the functions they perform. The aim of this article is to investigate insubordinate if-clauses from the perspective of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) in order to establish a taxonomy reflecting (and linking) their functional and formal properties. It is argued that FDG is ideally suited for this task as (i) it takes a function-to-form approach; (ii) it does not take the clause or sentence as its basic unit of analysis, but rather the (independent or subsidiary) Discourse Act; and (iii) it recognizes a range of interpersonal and representational modifiers. The basis for the classification proposed is corpus data from a range of corpora of spoken and written English and Dutch.