The Ifs and Buts of Instructional Language: An Alternative Account of Conditional Clauses

 

Elizabeth O’Dowd,

Saint Michael’s College, Vermont

 

Mia Thomas-Ruzic

University of Colorado at Denver

 

 

This paper will examine the function of if (conditional) clauses in naturally-occurring instructional language. The study was motivated by Thompson’s recent analysis of English syntactic constructions (2001), and specifically of object complement clauses in conversation (2000), where she challenges traditional notions of complex sentence structure by representing “complement” clauses as independent utterances. Her radical claim that the grammar of spoken English differs markedly from the predictions of most linguistic models deserves examination by extension both to other constructions than complement clauses, and to other genres than everyday conversation.

 

If clauses in instructional discourse present a good test case for Thompson’s claim. First of all, if clauses, like complement clauses, are traditionally understood as subordinate elements in complex sentence constructions. In academic written prose, they are said to specify “conditions under which facts hold.” (Biber et al., 1999: 821 -5). Thus, in instructional spoken discourse, where facts are being explained, we might expect a preponderance of well-formed (if clause + main clause) utterances with the logical-semantic function of setting truth conditions for main-clause propositions.

 

This, however, seems not to be the case. Preliminary analysis of a college-physics tutoring session reveals that there is no good reason to see if clauses as part of a canonical “condition + consequence” template. If clauses occur more often than not as independent assertions with no identifiable connection to a “main” clause. Their function is rarely to mark truth conditions, but much more often to assess, evaluate, request, advise, or direct. In fact, certain repair or negotiation sequences seem to suggest a constraint against the fully-formed if-then template. When if clauses do co-occur with “main” clauses, it is often in a non-contiguous context where the connection is so tenuous as to be questionable. And in those cases where the complex construction appears uncontroversially, the if clause appears again to make a more interactive than propositional contribution, setting the stage for an evaluative, directive, or otherwise subjective speech act.

 

The information status of these if clauses, which is typically familiar or accessible, also seems to suggest that the if construction is less often employed for asserting new propositional content or setting up new episodic frames than for anchoring other assertions. One more surprise yielded by the data is the under-employment of if clauses for denoting hypothetical, irrealis conditions. This function seems to be more often taken up by “if-less” lexical expressions such as Let’s say.

 

The proposed paper will examine if clauses in two very different instructional contexts: a one-on-one physics tutoring session, and a large-group, lecture-style training session in CPR.. All utterances including if clauses will be coded and analyzed in terms of their syntactic status (fragment or subordinate clause), their propositional content, and their interactive function. The methodology will parallel that of Thompson’s (2000) conversational analysis study of complement clauses, and it will test a parallel hypothesis: that if clauses work as independently manipulable formulae rather than as bound elements in construction, and that their combination with other clauses, when it happens, is driven more by interactive purposes than by syntactic constraints or propositional content.

 

To the extent that these hypotheses are confirmed, the paper will contribute to already considerable evidence that grammar is shaped by discourse use, and that this is as true for information-loaded discourse as it is for everyday conversation.