Paper 014: Factuality and conditional sentences with Indicative mood in subordinate clauses: a corpus-based study

Barrios, Leyre (Universitat de Lleida, Spain); Vázquez, Glòria (Universitat de Lleida, Spain)

Keywords: factuality, if-conditionals, Indicative, Spanish, annotation.

Abstract

Factuality (or certainty) is the notion that refers to the speaker’s commitment to the truthfulness of a situation, which is expressed through different linguistic markers. This study belongs to TAGFACT project whose aim is to analyze and automate the interpretation of factuality in Spanish in journalistic texts.
A conditional sentence consists of two clauses, a main clause (apodosis) and a subordinate clause (protasis), which are linked by a conjunction typically used for hypothetical situations (Quirk et al., 1985; Sweetser 1990, Dancygier 1993; Montolío, 1999; RAE 2009).
One of our aims of is to analyze the factuality of both clauses of some conditional sentences in Spanish, particularly those conditionals with protasis with Indicative and introduced by the conjunction si, which in English is if. Also, we pretend to propose linguistic clues for the automatic annotation of factuality for both clauses.
The protasis of a conditional sentence typically do not describe factual situations, but this is just in some types of conditionals. In addition, the factuality of apodosis has hardly been studied, which is very important, as we will see later.
For Spanish, there are studies that analyze the interpretation of the protasis of these sentences in terms of factuality, but not of the apodosis. Different bipartite (Veiga and Mosteiro, 2006) or tripartite (Montolío 1999) factual classifications have been made. Our study is based on the latter, since it goes deeper into formal issues and distinguishes between real, potential and unreal conditionals from the point of view of the protasis.
we have analyzed 241 if-conditionals from 3 different corpus: the corpus Now (Mark Davies, 2019), CORPES XXI (Real Academia de la lengua Española, 2020) and CREA (Real Academia de la lengua Española, 2015) whose protasis include indicative tenses: presente de Indicativo, pretérito imperfecto de Indicativo, pretérito perfecto simple and pretérito perfecto compuesto. In total, 25 temporal combinations have been analyzed.
Firstly, the interpretation of the factuality of the protasis has been revised, extending in some cases the current bibliographical proposal, and secondly, a factual interpretation has been proposed for the apodosis.
The result of this study is the proposal of a series of linguistic rules to formalize the interpretation of the factuality of the two clauses of the conditional sentences that present protasis with indicative in Spanish, thus completing the previous study done on the subjunctive (Barrios and Vázquez, 2020).

Bibliography
Barrios, L. and Vázquez, G. (2020). Factuality and conditional sentences with Subjunctive mood in subordinate clauses: a corpus-based study, in Congreso Internacional de Lingüística y de corpus (21-23 October, 2020), Colombia: Antioquía.
Dancygier, B. (1993): “Interpreting conditionals. Time, knowledge and causation”, Journal of Pragmatics, 19, pp. 403-434.
Davis, Mark (2018). Now. Corpus del español. Disponible en: https://www.corpusdelespanol.org/
Montolío, E. (1999) “Las construcciones condicionales”, in I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (vol. 3, pp. 3805-3878). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Rodríguez Rosique, S. (2008). Pragmática y Gramática: condicionales concesivas en español. In Studien Zur Romanischen Sprachwissenschaft Und Interkulturellen Kommunikation (Vol. 47). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Schwenter, S. (2001): Expectations and (in)sufficiency: Spanish como conditionals. Linguistics 39-4, pp. 733-760
Sweetser, E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics. Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge University Press / Peking University Press.
Veiga, A. y Mosteiro, M. (2006). El modo verbal en cláusulas condicionales, causales, consecutivas, concesivas, finales y adverbiales de lugar, tiempo y modo. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.

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