Signs of epistemic usage of conditional conjunctions

The article is devoted to complex sentences with the conditional conjunction "if", used epistemically: it expresses semantic connection between the proposition of subordinate clause and the epistemic component of the semantics of principal clause. The principal clause expresses a conclusion that, can be made provided that the situation described by the subordinate clause takes place. The subject of the study is the formal and semantic peculiarities of these sentences, determined by the epistemic use of the conjunction. The purpose of the article is to analyze the differences between the sentences under consideration and sentences with a proper conditional meaning. For this purpose, the method of comparative analysis of semantics and lexical-grammatical peculiarities of proper conditional sentences and sentences with epistemic "if" is used, and the descriptive method is also used: contrastive features of these sentences are identified and analyzed. Comparative analysis shows that sentences with the epistemic "if" differ from proper conditional ones by a number of features. Firstly, these sentences have different systemic connections, unequal possibilities of their paraphrasing and transformation into a simple sentence. Secondly, the subjective nature of the conclusion and its connection with the speaker's mental activity determines the propositional and modal semantics of the principal clause of the sentence with the epistemic "if", its compatibility with certain types of predicates, with modal indicators, with parenthetical words. Further, the conclusion does not necessarily rely on objective relations of conditionality between the situations denoted by the principal and subordinate clause, it does not set a one-to-one correspondence between the principal and subordinate clause and the condition and consequence, and strict taxis relations between the situations. Finally, the basis for the conclusion, unlike the objective condition, should not be unreal and has no correspondence among the adverbials in the simple sentence.

complex sentences, subordinate clause of condition, conditional conjunction, conjunction if, conditionality relations, proper conditional meaning, propositional use of the conjunction, improper conditional meaning, asymmetric structure sentences, epistemic use of the conjunction