If‐conditionals as arguments in Nineteenth‐Century women's instructive writing in English

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the if-conditionals in a corpus of cookery recipes written by women, namely the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (1800–1899) (CoWITE19). These texts are original texts written by British and American women between 1800 and 1850. They are notable for the inclusion of coordinating and subordinating structures employed to detail the procedure of each recipe, and for the use of conditionals within that process. The research presented here mainly follows Warchal’s (2010) taxonomy of conditional clauses into content conditionals in relation to the ideational function of language, and epistemic and speech-act conditionals having to do with the interpersonal. The current study applied a corpus linguistics methodology to identify examples of if-sentences, which were then manually examined. The results of this research seem to indicate that epistemic and speech-act conditionals are more numerous than content conditionals, as 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 are likely to register the familiar terms of address that further favour an interpersonal relationship.