| It is common for individuals in daily life to express assumptions,conjectures,personal plans,or expectations of others by using if-conditionals.Academic and news texts are both considered relatively formal written texts in terms of style,however,in terms of formality,news texts are ranked lower than academic terms,and language expressions are more complex and flexible.Academic discourse is objective and scientific,while news discourse has some subjective comments and notices.If-conditional is a common and complex syntactic structure in the English language and is widely used in academic discourse and news discourse.At the syntactic level,previous research ignore the influence of discourse and context.Accordingly,it is worthwhile to explore the difference in the use of if-conditionals in objective academic discourses and subjective news discourses,using corpus-based research methods at the discourse level.In accordance with the corpus-based research method,this study has collected 2,000if-conditionals and their contextual texts from the two sub-corpora of Academic and News in the Corpus of Contemporary America(COCA).It is the purpose of this paper to examine the three main characteristics of if-conditionals: modality,type,and information structure,and to compare the manifestation and exploitation of all three of the metafunctions in academic and news discourses.According to the research findings,the use of if-conditionals gives rise to differences in discourse.The first aspect is that in terms of form,in contrast to academic discourses,it can be found that conditional clauses in news articles are more commonly found at the beginning of sentences.Secondly,in terms of meaning,the main clause in the if-conditional in news discourse and academic discourse is modalized,with the modal verb primarily being used to express this meaning.There is a tendency for conditional sentences in news articles to use informal language,but this is less prevalent in academic texts.As a final point,the use of modal verbs in academic discourse serves an interpersonal function,and there are significant differences in the use of modal verbs in news discourse on three levels: syntax,semantics,and pragmatics.Regarding the type of if-conditional,both academic discourse and news discourse use content conditional to realize ideational function.In news discourse,epistemic conditionals and speech act conditionals are more commonly used to express interpersonal functions.The textual function can be realized by the use of if-conditionals containing new,given,and inferrable information in the information structure,moreover,in information structure,if-conditionals can create a referential link to realize the connection and the promotion of topics. |
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