Concessive conditionals beyond Europe

Abstract

The present study is concerned with complex sentences known as concessive conditionals from a functional-typological perspective. It examines the coding strategies used in the protasis of the three subtypes of concessive conditionals – viz. scalar, alternative, and universal concessive conditionals – in a global sample of 17 languages, thus complementing a previous study of their formal properties in European languages (Haspelmath & König 1998). The results include some coding strategies which are unattested in European languages and suggest that Haspelmath & König’s division between languages which mark the three subtypes uniformly and languages which mark them differentially is too simplistic, there being at least four overall marking patterns rather than two. Although these results are only preliminary in nature, they do look promising for future research, which should be based on a larger and more strictly stratified sample.