The Spanish Conditional (with Reference to English and Czech): A Contrastive Cognitive Approach

Abstract

The monograph examines the Spanish conditional (cantaría) with respect to the English conditional (would) and the Czech conditional (zpíval bych). The text presents a classification of all the uses of this verb form based on cognitive grammar and Langacker’s notion of ground. The classification is based on extensive authentic material obtained from parallel and monolingual corpora. The analysis takes into account the modal, temporal and evidential characteristics of the conditional. The conditional meaning is dependent on the existence of a secondary ground, which is defined as the default feature.