SPEECH ACT OF PROMISE IN CONDITIONAL CLAUSE APODOSIS

Abstract

The paper analyses conditional clauses with apodoses that are classified as speech acts of promise. It also observes the communicative protasis function – in some examples (1) it is an indirect directive, a plea/ suggestion/ request/ recommendation, etc. Structures like these are characterized by a bargain struck between the addressant and adressee. In other examples (2) the protasis only describes a situation that is beneficial both to the realization of the promise and to the interlocutor. It also describes a problematic situation that the speaker is going to solve. The author also points out the syntactic and semantic characteristics of such conditional sentences: the use of conjunctions, protasis and apodosis predicate structure, the arrangement of the protasis and apodosis part, etc. The corpus includes select Serbian television shows of different genres (comedy, drama, and crime), and works of children prose by Desanka Maksimović and Grozdana Olujić. In most cases, the protasis predicate is formed as present verb of perfective aspect, while the apodosis predicate is mostly in Future I form. Although the protasis that precedes the apodosis infers a logical cause-consequence flow, which makes this arrangement common in conditional clauses, in excerpted examples, the inverted arrangement is also frequent – the apodosis takes the first position, bringing the promise in focus, while the interlocutor’s offer is secondary.