The ‘Drama-Queen’ and Other Conditionals in Real Discourse

Abstract

The formal approach to conditionals, treating them in a decontextualized manner, has been the most developed. The present paper shows how problematic this approach can be when conditionals are studied in context. One large class of conditionals could be termed ‘interactional’, and includes formulaic if-clauses of politeness, conditionals which soften the message, speech-act conditionals emphasizing the relevance of some information given beforehand, and paratactic conditionals making promises or issuing threats. It is to this eclectic class that the ‘drama queen’ conditional is added. Recently discovered, this conditional does not deal with either truth or hypotheticality, but with the human emotions of the people who face their reality and compare it with their own past. Not unlike the conditionals that relay the message “It’s absurd!”, the ‘drama queen’ conditionals convey the message “It’s unimaginable!”.