Conditional Voices: A Comparative Study of If-Constructions in Sri Lankan and Kenyan Letters to the Editor

Conditional structures, typically including the word if, can be used in diverse ways that are still being explored. Prototypically, they occur at the beginning of a matrix clause and mitigate an assertion by setting a logical condition on its truth. However, previous research has shown both their positioning and function to correlate with genre and discourse function. The specifics of such variation are yet to be filled in; further, the research concerning this type of variation in English is so far based on an insufficiently wide variety of Englishes. To address these gaps, this research investigates the use of if-constructions in a corpus of several hundred 21^st-century letters to the editor (LTEs) from two English-language national newspapers, one Kenyan and one Sri Lankan. LTEs are an argumentative genre, concerned with identifying and solving communal problems, in which the writer's identity as a community member is highly salient. Related to the nature of this genre, I present a data-driven taxonomy of discourse functions for if-constructions. I further show that the positioning of the construction relative to the main clause is linked to the discourse purposes. Finally, the data reveal some differences between Kenyan and Sri Lankan letters, suggesting that if-constructions are one facet of the LTEs that are sensitive to local culture.