Conditional sentence constructions in English : frequencies and distribution in American and British English A corpus-based study

Abstract EN

This study is a corpus-based research, which investigates patterns and frequency of use of conditional sentence (CS) constructions, with four conditional conjunctions (CCs): if, unless, provided that and on condition that.

Data is obtained from two corpora,: the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

Further, this study examines the patterns and frequency of use of those CCs in spoken, written and different sections of COCA and BNC.

This study also investigates the most frequently used collocates with subjunctive conditionals (if I/she/ he/it were) in the spoken and written subsections of BNC and COCA.

The results showed that frequency of use of subjunctive conditionals is more common in the written subsection of BNC, whereas it is more frequent in the spoken subsection of COCA.

Cross sectional distribution showed that the usage of idiomatic expressions is dominant in fiction in both corpora.