Conditionals in spoken courtroom and parliamentary discourse in English, French, and Spanish

This chapter explores if-conditionals in English, French and Spanish legal discourse, responding to the scarcity of cross-linguistic studies on conditionals in this genre. In particular, I examine conditionals in courtroom and parliamentary discourse on the basis of corpus evidence from various sources, proposing a cognitive-functional approach that looks at both prototypical and less prototypical uses of conditionality. The findings from the corpus analysis indicate that conditionals in legal discourse are primarily used to express canonical conditions but also function, to a lesser extent, as interpersonal and textual devices. Results also suggest that modal verbs, highly present in these constructions, have different uses depending on the function expressed by the clause.