Coding the Hypothetical: A comparative typology of Russian and Macedonian conditionals: 38 (Studies in Language Companion Series) - Hardcover

Hacking, Jane F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9027230412 ISBN 13: 9789027230416

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 1998

Synopsis

Conditionals encode speculation. They convey how events could have been different in the past or present, or might be different in the future if particular conditions had been or will be met. While all languages afford the means to speculate or hypothesize about possible events, the ways in which they do so vary. This work explores some of this variation through an analysis of the stucture and semantics of complex conditional sentences in Russian and Macedonian. It addresses typological questions about the general properties of natural language conditionals and examines the role of the grammatical categories tense, aspect, mood and status in the coding of conditional meaning. The book also discusses the relationship between the use of these categories and the shape of a language’s conditional system. For example, the use of tense in counterfactual contexts in Macedonian correlates with the grammaticalization of more shades of conditional meaning than are grammaticalized in Russian, which does not employ tense forms in this way. The study draws on data from a rich variety of sources and thus includes kinds of conditionals overlooked in many other studies. The book addresses issues of concern to Slavists and raises questions for those interested in conditionals and the coding of hypothetical meaning.

About this title

Synopsis

A conditional relationship between two events is one in which the realization of one event is dependent upon or conditioned by another. Languages express or encode this relationship through a variety of morphosyntactic and lexical means. This text provides a systematic structural treatment of the complex conditional sentence in Codified Literary Russian and Standard Macedonian. The book emphasizes the grammatical expression of conditionality in the two languages, focusing on verb morphology and the rich system of modal particles in Macedonian. It explores how grammatical categories - such as tense, aspect, mood and status - are used to encode conditional meaning in the two languages. These categories are also used as a means of organizing and analyzing conditional sentence data. By analyzing this data and constructing typologies of the two conditional systems, the author aims to shed light on the theoretical questions connected to the formulation of the categories themselves.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027230412
• ISBN 13: 9789027230416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 166