Linguistic expression of rhetorical relations of circumstance and condition through adverbial clause of time and adverbial clause of condition
Keywords:
Rhetorical Structure Theory, Functional Discourse Grammar, clause combining.Abstract
In this paper, we propose the use of factuality and presupposition parameters from the Functional Discourse Grammar in order to characterize adverbial clauses of condition and time, which hold rhetorical relations of circumstance and condition in a corpus with formed speeches and interviews. These rhetorical relations, according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, are implicit propositions that arise from the combination of clauses or larger text portions. We found three types of conditional constructions regarding factuality and presupposition. In the case of time clauses,
factuality and presupposition were relevant to determine the relation: factual time clauses hold circumstance relation whereas non-factual and non-presupposed time clauses hold condition relation.