Grammaticalization of Syntactic Incompleteness: Free Conditionals in Italian and Other Languages

Abstract

Many subordinate clauses introduced by se (‘if’) in spoken Italian are not actually embedded in any (overt) main clause. Instead, the “missing” main clauses assume a number of semantic values that have become conventionally associated with the se clauses under examination. It is argued that such clauses should no longer be described as unembedded, and hence incomplete, conditional clauses. Rather, they should be viewed as a new construction typical of spoken language, constituted by an independent clause introduced by se and having its own, almost codified meanings. The absence of the main clause has taken on a precise grammatical function, allowing the unembedded conditional to become a new kind of sentence. Having clear pragmatic grounds, these phenomena probably occur in similar ways in other languages. This hypothesis is briefly checked on evidence from other languages, both Indoeuropean and non-Indoeuropean. 1. Unembedded conditional clauses Spoken Italian shows the presence of a construction that may be regarded as belonging to the “periphery” rather than the “center” of grammar, and is completely absent in writing. Many subordinate clauses introduced by se (the subordinating conjunction for conditionals and indirect interrogatives, ‘if’) are not actually embedded in any (overt) main clause. The majority of them can only be interpreted as conditional clauses. In all these cases the utterance shows a certain degree of semantic incompleteness, because the addressee is obliged to imagine the content of the main clause which is not