The volume brings together a selection of papers from a symposium on Conditionality held in the University of Duisburg on 25-26 March 1994. Ten years after the Stanford symposium, the Proceedings of which were edited by Traugott et al. (1986), the area of conditionality is revisited in a synthesis of issues and aspects with insights drawn from the wider framework of general processes of conceptualisation. One major question is therefore what conceptual categories fall under conditionality or how far the notion of conditionality can be extended. The volume represents the up-to-date research on most aspects of conditionality some of which include the relationship between conditionality, hypotheticality and counterfactuality, polarity, historical perspectives, concessives, the acquisition of conditionals.

The book examines conditionals in the Greek Pentateuch from the point of view of the study of translation syntax. It takes seriously into account the double character of Septuagintal Greek, both as a translation from Hebrew and as vernacular Greek. Methodologically, the underlying Hebrew is taken as the point of departure in close comparison with the resultant translation, with the purpose of examining major features in the translators? handling of this complex construction. These include the rendering of verbal and non-verbal forms in the protasis and apodosis, the question of sense-division between the two constituent clauses, the influence of genre or discourse type and interference from the underlying form or structure. Detailed analyses of the resultant translation displays features that are natural Greek, on the one hand, and features that betray the character of "translation-language", on the other hand, owing to interference from the source text. The latter manifests itself most conspicuously in renderings that are ungrammatical or unnatural, and, in a more subtle way, through equivalents which are grammatically acceptable but occur with a strikingly high frequency in the Septuagint as compared with original Greek compositions contemporary with the Septuagint.

A unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This book by distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher seeks to clarify the idea of what a conditional says by elucidating the information that is normally transmitted by its utterance. The result is a unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This approach, argues Rescher, makes it easier to understand how conditionals actually function in our thought and discourse. In its concern with what language theorists call pragmatics—the study of the norms and principles governing our use of language in conveying information—Conditionals steps beyond the limits of logic as traditionally understood and moves into the realm claimed by theorists of artificial intelligence as they try to simulate our actual information-processing practices. The book's treatment of counterfactuals essentially revives an epistemological approach proposed by F. P. Ramsey in the 1920s and developed by Rescher himself in the 1960s but since overshadowed by the now-dominant possible-worlds approach. Rescher argues that the increasingly evident liabilities of the possible-worlds strategy make a reappraisal of the older style of analysis both timely and desirable. As the book makes clear, an epistemological approach demonstrates that counterfactual reasoning, unlike inductive inference, is not a matter of abstract reasoning alone but one of good judgment and common sense.

This book is an extremely detailed and comprehensive examination of conditional sentences in English, using many examples from actual language-use. The syntax and semantics of conditionals (including tense and mood options) and the functions of conditionals in discourse are examined in depth, producing an all-round linguistic view of the subject which contains a wealth of original observations and analyses. Not only linguists specializing in grammar but also those interested in pragmatics and the philosophy of language will find this book a rewarding and illuminating source.

First Published in 1999. This book investigates the meaning of conditional protasis markers like Spanish si 'if' and English if from a pragmatic perspective. A standard assumption in linguistics is that these words encode as part of their semantics notions like hypothetical, irrealis, or, from the speaker's point of view, uncertain, as in constructed examples like (la), where speaker B is unsure whether the proposition she's eating is true or not.

This book proposes a semantic theory of conditionals that can account for (i) the variability in usages that conditional sentences can be put; and (ii) both conditional sentences of the form ‘if p, q’ and those conditional thoughts that are expressed without using ‘if’. It presents theoretical arguments as well as empirical evidence from English and other languages in support of the thesis that an adequate study of conditionals has to go beyond an analysis of specific sentence forms or lexical items. The resulting perspective on conditionals is one in which conditionality is located at a higher level than that of the sentence; namely, at the level of thought. The author argues that it is only through adopting such a perspective, and with it, a commitment to context-dependent semantics, that we can successfully represent conditional utterances as they are used and understood by ordinary language users. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on the semantics of conditionals in the fields of linguistics (especially semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy of language.

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.

The focus on communication in TBLT often comes at the expense of form. In this book, the task-based approach is enhanced and coupled with insights into (cognitive) grammar, an approach which sees grammar as meaningful. The book shows how grammar teaching can be integrated into a communicative lesson in a non-explicit way, i.e., "by the backdoor". The learners are involved in situations that they may also encounter outside their classrooms and they are given communicative tasks they are to work on and solve, usually with a partner or in small groups. What teachers need to invest for preparing such lessons is their own creativity, as they have to come up with communicative situations which guide the learners into using a specific grammatical structure. The book first discusses the didactic and the linguistic theories involved and then translates these theoretical perspectives into actual teaching practice, focusing on the following grammatical phenomena: tense, aspect, modality, conditionals, passive voice, prepositions, phrasal verbs, verb complementation, pronouns and articles.

Counterfactual thinking is a universal cognitive process in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. This type of reasoning is at the center of daily operations, as decision-making, risk preventability or blame assignment. More generally, non-factual scenarios have been defined as a crucial ingredient of desire and modern love. If the areas covered by this reasoning are so varied, the L2 learner will be led to express 'what might have been' at some point of her acquisitional itinerary. How is this reasoning expressed in French, Spanish and Italian? By the use of what lexical, syntactic and grammatical devices? Will the learner combine these devices as the native French speakers do? What are the L1 features likely to fossilize in the L2 grammar? What are the information principles governing a communicative task based on the production of counterfactual scenarios? These are some of the questions addressed by the present volume.