From subordination to insubordination

Winner of the Guadalupe Aguado Research Award for Early Career Researchers 2023 from the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics (AESLA). https://www.aesla.org.es/es/premios

This book explores if/si-constructions in spoken English, French and Spanish, from a functional-pragmatic and corpus-based perspective. The analysis comprises instances of subordination, namely, conditional constructions – including prototypical cause-consequence patterns as well as other conditionals in which the conditional meaning is weaker – and cases of insubordination introduced by if and si. The theoretical framework is based on the three metafunctions distinguished in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the data analysed are retrieved from parliamentary discourse and conversations corpora. The examination of conditional constructions and cases of insubordination in parallel offers new light on the characterization of if/si-constructions and their uses and functions in interaction.

Cristina Lastres-López holds a PhD in advanced English studies (linguistics) from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Prior to that, she obtained a BA in English language and literature from the University of Santiago de Compostela and an MA in English linguistics from University College London. She currently works at the University of Seville and is a member of the research unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization of the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, grammar and pragmatics.