Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD student in Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor of Linguistics,Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Conditional constructions are linguistic expressions in which the occurrence of a phenomenon or situation is subject to the occurrence of another phenomenon or situation. This type of construction has different tense patterns regarding its semantic features. This study was conducted to explain the representation of Aspect and Mood and the relationship between them in Persian conditionals. In the present study, the approaches of Comrie (1976) and Palmer (2001) were applied to establish mood and aspect, and Possible World Typology of Conditionals, as put forward by Declerck and Reed (2001), to investigate the semantic classification of conditions. The corpus included 540 conditional constructions extracted from a total of 5 works of contemporary novelists. Analysis of Persian conditional constructions showed that grammatical aspect often appears in the secondary role and function as a mood in such constructions. Further, expression of the unreality of the conditional clause in most conditionals is established through subjunctive mood.

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