Interpersonal Value of Conditional Sentences in Women’s Instructive Writing in the XIX century

Abstract

This paper analyses the possible interpersonal value of conditional sentences in a corpus of recipes called Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English, the 19th century sub-corpus (COWITE19)1. Recipes, usually defined as a set of instructions aimed at preparing a dish, describe more or less complex preparation methods which require the use of subordinate structures, among which conditional sentences abound. Conditionals are thus employed for several functions such as specifying the steps during the cooking process, advising, warning, and even commanding. Conditional relations are broadly categorised into three types: (1) content or “real-world” conditionals which, if realised, make certain the truth of the proposition in the main clause; (2) epistemic conditionals, in which the knowledge of the truth of the hypothesis can be a sufficient condition for concluding the truth of the proposition in the main clause; and (3) speech-act conditionals, in which the performance of the speech act contained in the main clause is conditional if the state described by the condition is fulfilled (Greenbaum & Quirk 1985; Sweetser 1990; Warchal 2010; Links 2018). According to this classification, content conditionals are related to the ideational function of language, whereas epistemic and speech-act conditionals favour the interpersonal function. For this study, the cooking books published between 1806 and 1849 have been selected. They have been written by British and American women and have been computerised and saved as plain text so that they can be used in linguistic software. The methodology conducted involves interrogating the corpus to find examples of the conditional markers “if” and “unless” by making use of the software CasualConc by Imao. The results of this research seem to indicate that epistemic and speech-act conditionals are more numerous than content ones in that the writers try to guide the reader towards an effective execution of the recipe. A subtle communication is thus established between the female who writes the manual and her apprentices, who should be capable of perceiving a more familiar address. The use of conditionals also entails argumentation from the consequences because the recipe writers refer to the good or bad effects of (not) following their indications (Walton 1999). This further interpersonal meaning is related to prolepsis, a rhetorical figure characterised by the prediction and foreshadow of certain events which are aimed, in this case, at the prospective outcome of the recipe (Mehlenbacher 2017). This study concludes that the use of conditionals in this instructive type of writing favours an interpersonal relation between the female writers and their readers, which also reflects its argumentative and possible persuasive value.