From subordination to insubordination

This book explores if/si-constructions in spoken English, French and Spanish, from a functional-pragmatic and corpus-based perspective. The analysis comprises instances of subordination, namely, conditional constructions - including prototypical cause-consequence patterns as well as other conditionals in which the conditional meaning is weaker - and cases of insubordination introduced by if and si. The theoretical framework is based on the three metafunctions distinguished in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the data analysed are retrieved from parliamentary discourse and conversations corpora. The examination of conditional constructions and cases of insubordination in parallel offers new light on the characterization of if/si-constructions and their uses and functions in interaction.