This book is a very detailed and comprehensive examination of conditional sentences in English. Unlike previous literature on the subject, it does not confine itself to one or two aspects of conditionals, but attempts to give an all-round linguistic view of the topic. The more traditional areas of tense and mood possibilities in conditionals and the types of possible world to which a conditional may refer are closely examined, with new evidence showing that the usual bi- or tripartite schema in this area needs both clarification and elaboration. The authors provide a fine-grained classification of conditionals and a rich analysis of their function(s) in discourse, which will be of interest both in its own right and as part of the complete picture of conditionals given here. Separate chapters on the question of 'necessary and/or sufficient conditions' and the syntax of conditionals retain an emphasis on the relation of semantics and syntax to discourse, providing original analyses of these topics. A range of corpora is exploited to provide a wealth of empirical data which both illustrate and shape theoretical discussion. The authors do not espouse any particular linguistic framework, but provide analyses which blend pragmatics, descriptive syntax and semantics. An extensive glossary gives details both of the specific meanings attributed here to traditional linguistic terms and new terms which are introduced by the authors in their analysis of the many features of conditional sentences which are here described for the first time.FROM THE CONTENTS1 Introduction2 Conditional connecting devices3 Some preliminary terminology4 The possible-world typology of conditionals5 The use of tenses in possible-world conditionals6 Modalized case-specifying conditionals7 The three canonical tense patterns8 The relation between the theoretical world and the actual world9 A typology of case-specifying P-clauses10 Rhetorical conditionals11 Syntactically marked conditional structures12 Sufficient and/or necessary conditions13 Uses and interpretations of unless14 The meanings and uses of even ifGlossaryReferencesAuthor IndexSubject Index