The Case of Hebrew "If Already": A Constructionist View

Abstract:The paper investigates the Hebrew speech act conditional אם כבר ‘if already’ from a constructionist perspective, suggesting that the construction represents a form-function pairing which associates a syntactic structure with a pragmatic function. On the formal side, the construction inherits semantic and syntactic properties of other conditionals. On the functional side, speech-act orientation (namely speaker, hearer, and discourse-orientation) motivates diverse scalar relations between the protasis and the apodosis which are interpreted to a great extent based on pragmatic factors. The analysis shows for example that a speaker-oriented perspective introduced in the protasis by the pattern אם כבר regarding the issue of flying as in אם כבר לטוס אז בסטייל ‘if already to fly then in style’ (= if it came to the point of flying, then it would be better to do it with style) sets the background for the speech act of recommendation in the apodosis. The entire sentence is associated with a suggestion for an alleviation of a subjectively inconvenient situation thereby giving rise to an upward scaling. This interpretation relies on pragmatic knowledge shared by the interlocutors such as the speaker’s identity, personal experience, and attitude toward flying.