Abstract
This chapter explores conditional constructions introduced byifandsiin British English and European Spanish parliamentary discourse, with data drawn from the Hansard Corpus of the British parliament and theDiario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputadosof the Spanish parliament. I propose a categorisation of conditionals according to the metafunctions set out by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), in order to encompass prototypical and less prototypical uses of these constructions. Corpus findings indicate that in addition to their prototypical use in expressing cause–consequence relations, conditionals in parliamentary discourse also function, to a lesser extent, as interpersonal and textual devices, especially in Spanish. Results also suggest a correlation between pragmatic and morphosyntactic variation in some of these constructions.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company