Semantic Classification of Conditional Construction in Persian Language

Abstract

Conditional constructions consist of two clauses. The existence or non-existence of a causal relationship between these two clauses causes the conditional construction to be divided into two groups: consequential and non- consequential conditionals. The literature review of conditional concept shows that it can be introduced a variety of conditional constructions according to various criteria though sometimes the same phenomena differ in how they are named. In the present study, by reviewing the literature and based on the corpus-based approach in the Persian language, it was attempted to provide a model that covers various types of conditional construction according to similarities and differences in their properties. The findings showed that in addition to open, hypothetical, real, rhetorical, relevant and implicit assertion conditional construction, the four different types of conditionals including contrastive, implicational contrastive, converse and reverse conditionals can be also introduced. In the contrastive conditional, both clauses describe some related property but differ in some values assigned to the shared property. In implicational contrastive conditional, there is a contrast relationship between one clauses and the inference of the other one. In the converse conditional, contrary to the basic conditional, the "if clause” is the result of the second clause and in the reverse conditionals both clauses simultaneously are conditioned by the other one.

Keywords

• conditional construction
• basic conditionals
• speech act conditionals
• causal relationship
• persian language