Attenuative Functions of the Conditional

As Ondráček notes, “the conditional is not restricted to conditional sentences only. The unreality of the action continues to be its characteristic feature but is no longer based on an explicit condition, although in many cases some sort of condition still remains in the background”.205 This function of the conditional is attenuation, and accounts for various related functions, including reported information and politeness strategies. While recent work on the conditional, particularly in French, has re-defined attenuation as a small sub-type of modal use of the conditional, limited to the use of the verbs dire,vouloir anddevoir, the broader sense of the term will be used here.206 This type of conditional use serves “à marquer la distance du locuteur vis-à-vis de ce qui est dit”, and is used in situations where the speaker wishes to show that they are not necessarily fully committed to the reality or truth value of a statement.207 The primary attenuative function operates when “the conditional is called into service to express under the guise of a possibility or probability what is in reality a fact” in phrases such as il serait neuf heures.208 Italian forms the exception to this rule, as Squartini explains: “a differenza del francese l’italiano non ammette però l’impiego del Condizionale per esprimere un minor grado di impegno epistemico da parte del locutore”, instead requiring the use of the future to express this possibility.209

205

Jaroslav Ondráček, ‘On Some Characteristic Features of the Conditional and the Subjunctive in Italian and in English Compared with Finnish and Czech’,Brno Studies in English, 15 (1983), 111-35 (p.116).

206_{Pierre Haillet, Le conditionnel dans le discourse journalistique. Essai de linguistique descriptive}

(Québec: Bref, 1995), pp. 224-5.

With the possible exception of politeness usage, the types of attenuation described here are those that fall within Dendale’s definition of the “conditionnel d’emprunt”. Although the terminology is slightly at variance with Dendale’s, the basic analysis of the main types of conditional use are, in fact, the same.

Dendale, ‘Les problèmes’, p. 9. 207

María Luisa Donaire, ‘La mise en scène duconditionnelou quand le locouteur reste en coulisses’,

Le Français Moderne, 66.2 (1998), 204-27 (p. 205).

208 _{T. A. Daley, ‘What is the French Conditional?’, Modern Language Journal, 26.2 (1942), 133-6}

(p. 136). 209

Squartini, ‘Relazione semantica’, p. 78. For examples, see Rohlfs,Sintassi, pp. 53-4

Brambilla Ageno also devotes considerable attention to the use of the conditional in rhetorical questions, which could best be classed as falling into the category of attenuation proper. In these constructions, the conditional is used deliberately to distance the speaker from the events reported, with the degree of implicit disbelief at the possibility of the events described creating a (negative) value judgment in phrases such aschi avrebbe mai pensato!210

The broad attenuative function described above can also include politeness strategies. In most situations, a speaker aims to produce “un énoncé qui est en apparence inoffensif, c’est-à-dire non nuisible aux interlocuteurs”.211 If the indicative is interpreted as a mood of definiteness, with the potential to “imposer une certaine vision du monde, un certain système de croyance”, the attenuative character of the conditional can provide a means to weaken the impositional force of an indicative form.212As such a marker of politeness, the conditional is therefore particularly suited to certain modal verbs which possess strong illocutionary force, such asvolere/vouloir

and dovere/devoir. The use of the conditional in phrases such as vorrei qualcosa/je voudrais quelque chose, where the speaker does not wish to be seen to be making a forceful demand, softens the request. Leone, for example, refers to an incidence of the extension of the conditional afterse in a letter: although strictly speaking incorrect in a high-register text, he considers that the writer “ha inteso accentuare il tono cortese che caratterizza tutta la lettera”, and because he or she “ha inteso trasportare nella forma dipendente quella stessa sfumatura di modestia o discrezione […]

210_{Franca Brambilla Ageno,Il verbo nell’italiano antico: ricerche di sintassi(Milan: Ricciardi, 1964),}

pp. 341-3.

See also Tasmowski and Haillet for a more detailed consideration of the difficulties raised by the use of the conditional in non-rhetorical questions.

Liliane Tasmowski, ‘Questions au conditionnel’, inLe conditionnel en français, ed. by Patrick Dendale and Liliane Tasmowski (Metz: Université de Metz, 2001), pp. 331-43.

Haillet, Pierre Patrick, ‘À propos de l’interrogation totale directe au conditionnel’, inLe conditionnel en français, ed. by Patrick Dendale and Liliane Tasmowski (Metz: Université de Metz, 2001), pp. 295-330.

211

Caroline Foullioux and Didier Tejedor de Felipe, ‘À propos du mode et de l’atténuation’,Langue Française, 142 (2004), 112-28 (p. 114).

conseguentamente non ha potuto fare altro che conservare il condizionale”.213 The type of conditional usage in such sentences as Questo andrebbe controllato, or Da parte degli adulti non si dovrebbero mai usare espressioni volgari davanti ai bambini, probably falls into the category of attenuation proper, in that a certain degree of doubt as to the absolute necessity or prohibition of an action is implicit in the construction.214 Given that sentences of this type may also function as a command, in many contexts this type of conditional use could also imply a degree of courtesy sufficient for it to be included within the politeness function of attenuation. As Maiden suggests, politeness structures “probably originate as ‘virtual’ hypothetical structures, where some protasis is implicit”, perhaps based on the convenience of the person addressed, with either an explicit or implicit condition if it is convenient to you.215 Indeed, Haillet goes as far as to say that these constructions should not be regarded as attenuative at all, but should be viewed solely as conditional sentences.216 While this analysis has some merit, the non-explicit nature of the protasis means that these constructions also fall within the broader definition of attenuation proposed at the beginning of this section.

Reported information is the other main attenuative function of the conditional falling within Dendale’s “conditionnel d’emprunt”. It describes situations where information is explicitly attributed to a source other than the speaker, which “se caractérise par une absence totale de prise en charge, comparable à du discours rapporté”. Unlike attenuation proper, the conditional is used for this function in Italian as well as in the other Romance languages.217 Examples are to be found particularly in journalistic reportage, such as secondo le ultime notizie, i giapponesi avrebbero occupato Hankau, where the speaker makes it clear that they are reporting information gained

213_{Alfonso Leone, ‘S}

Eipotetico + conditionale’,Paideia, 46 (1991), 48-51 (p. 49).

214

Example taken from Maiden and Robustelli, p. 285.

215

Maiden,Linguistic History, p. 225.

216

Pierre Haillet, Le conditionnel dans le discourse journalistique. Essai de linguistique descriptive

(Québec: Bref, 1995), pp. 224-5. 217

Patrick Caudal and Carl Vetters, ‘Un traitement conjoint du conditionnel, du future et de l’imparfait: les temps comme des fonctions d’acte de langage’, Cahiers Chronos, 12 (2005), 109-124 (p. 120).

at second hand, for which they cannot or will not guarantee the veracity.218 Indirect speech, while formally similar in French to reported information constructions, differs in that it is the subordinating of a direct quotation rather than a general distancing of the speaker from his statement. Unlike the reported information constructions, indirect speech requires an explicit identification of the source of the quotation, an explicit verb marking the quotation, such as dire, and is generally to be found with the main verb in the past tense. The precise classification of the form within the range of conditional uses is, however, subject to debate. It could fall under the attenuative function of the conditional, as, in the same way as the reported information constructions, it could be regarded as implying an element of doubt about the truth of the statement quoted. The indirect speech construction could also be classified as a form of the ‘future in the past’, as it consists of a combination of the temporally past action il a dit/ha detto combined with a future action, il viendra/verrà, which is transposed into the conditional to convey relative posteriority. The fact that Italian requires the use of the conditional composite, the canonical ‘future in the past’ construction, for indirect speech suggests that Dendale is correct in subsuming it within the ‘future in the past’ function.219