Between Facts and Speech Acts: the Conditional and Condi­tional-Conjunctive in Moksha Mordvin
Between Facts and Speech Acts: the Conditional and Condi­tional-Conjunctive in Moksha Mordvin

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the semantic functions and the distribution of the Conditional and the Conditional-Conjunctive moods in Moksha ­Mordvin. Based on corpus data from Standard Moksha, I argue that these grammatical moods are not contiguous in semantic space: they rarely occur in hypothetical conditional clauses. The Conditional-Conjunctive is more restricted than the Conditional, both functionally and syntagmatically, as the former is not compatible with directive speech acts in the main clause, it requires that the predicate of the main clause is in the Conjunctive, it resists the occurrence of a correlative apodosis marker in the main clause, and it rarely occurs in postposed or inserted conditional clauses.

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