Conditionals And Subjectification

THERE have been grammarians who believe that if-conditionals of different sorts in English betray quite different or seemingly irrelevant properties resulting from different grammar-semantic behaviors. However, in modern linguistics, scholars ready to discuss this irrelevance have come under grave suspicions. Linguists of different branches who have been united by a common interest in the cognitive nature of language have come to argue that human cognition would provide a theoretical framework within which linguistic phenomena might be accounted for. Cognitive linguistics holds that there is a close relation between grammar and cognition: many grammatical principles are actually projected from the rules in reality through human beings cognition. The world schema, through the medium of human cognition, is projected to become the general framework of language design and the motivation of language use. In the course of perceiving the world, the speaker's/conceptualizer's attitudes, beliefs and emotions will inevitably permeate and affect the process and product of the interpretation of events and states of affairs and their relationships. This subjective evolvement will manifest itself in the linguistic structures. The if-conditional construction is no exception in that it is the mapping of the human cognition and construal of conditional relations between events and states of affairs of the real world unto language.From the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, subjectivity, which is recognized as a human cognitive motivation, plays an important role in the formation and evolution of syntactic structures.'Subjectivity'in this study is defined as the expression of self and representation of a speaker's perspective and point of view in the propositions;'subjectification'is defined as the structures and strategies that languages evolve in the linguistic realization of subjectivity or as the relevant processes of linguistic evolution themselves.The relevant literature reveals that the studies have been inadequate in the exploration of the relationship between the diversified meanings of if-conditional constructions. The past approaches, including the logic-semantic, functional-pragmatic, did not cover this...