If-conditionals as modality attractors

The talk will examine the case for treating if-conditionals as strong attractors of modality. The claim is tested through keyword comparisons of un-annotated corpora, namely a sample of 853 if-conditionals from the written BNC, and, as reference corpora, the written BNC Sampler, FLOB, all the if-sentences from the written sub-corpus of the BNC, and the non-conditional if-sentences from the sample. Further tests involve the comparison of specific modal words between the manually annotated sample and the annotated versions of BNC, BNC Sampler and FLOB. The talk will also comment on issues arising from problems encountered in the two types of comparison, as well as issues pertaining to corpus annotation, quantitative analysis, and the definition and formal characteristics of if-conditionals.