Will dans les subordonnées en if
This paper is based upon a corpus of about one hundred examples, drawn from the British National Corpus, of the use of the modal auxiliary will in some conditional if- clauses (for instance, it will work only if it will advantage business or if the death penalty will save a single life…), and also i...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO
2011-11-01
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| Series: | Corela |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/corela/2298 |
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| Summary: | This paper is based upon a corpus of about one hundred examples, drawn from the British National Corpus, of the use of the modal auxiliary will in some conditional if- clauses (for instance, it will work only if it will advantage business or if the death penalty will save a single life…), and also in a few concessive ones (if the economy will not defeat the regime, it will not save it either). The case in which will is used primarily to express volition (if she will sleep with him…) is not taken into account.I try to demonstrate that the use of the modal in the examples under consideration is meant to express the speaker’s attitude to the propositional content of the utterance as a whole, which is not so much the speaker’s personal opinion as the translation of the sometimes conflicting implications of a non-neutral context. From a more technical point of view, it can be shown that most of the time q, the main clause, is not located only with respect to p, the subordinate if- clause (as exemplified in the well-known formula: if p, then q), but also to p’, its linguistic complement. Time reference can also be an important factor in some of the examples studied (if you will be away on holiday), but they remain, in fact, a minority. I also put forward a typology of the main cases involved, bearing in mind that the components of such a typology must overlap one another since it often occurs that more than one phenomenon can account for the use of the modal in the subordinate. As far as the theoretical background is concerned, extensive reference is made to the linguistic concepts of A. Culioli’s utterer-centred approach. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-573X |