Kondicionalne kopulativne rečenice u bosanskome jeziku
Conditional copulative sentences in the Bosnian language

Summary/Abstract: Conditionality as a narrower semantic relation can be viewed as a type of a broader copulative semantic relation because the protasis and the apodosis are always same-directional. There are five grammatical types of conditional copulative sentences (CS) in Bosnian: CS with conditional imperative, CS with conditional infinitive, CS with conditional present, CS with conditional modal verbs or modal constructions meaning sufficiency, and CS with conditional non-verbal phrases. The most frequent are copulative sentences with conditional imperative. The usage of conditional imperative is based on ‘directive potential’ as a schematic (core) meaning of that grammatical form. By using conditional imperative, the speaker doesn’t put the addressee under the obligation of carrying out the imperative action, but to pay attention to the denoted situation because there is something important about it. Such a construction is always clearly intersubjective. Conditional imperative is typically used to refer to a scenario that is iterative in its nature, with a generic subject, which gives the basis for activation of meaning of readiness and/or inevitability. The protasis clauses in copulative sentences with conditional infinitive and conditional non-verbal phrases are clear instances of the ellipsis that was carried out by omitting modal verbs or modal constructions meaning sufficiency. Conditional present can be made either from the imperfect as well as the perfect verb aspect. All non-imperative conditional clauses in copulative sentences share the feature of absence of (direct) directionality as well as intersubjectivity. However, the meaning of readiness and inevitability (i.e. an automatic relation between the protasis and the apodosis) is still present in those constructions. On the other hand, all conditional copulative sentences share the following features: 1. They have the same origin: they are formed by metaphorical mapping from the local domain into the temporal domain (the domain of temporal successiveness) and finally into the domain of conditionality, according to this model: X and next to it Y > X and right after it Y > if X, then automatically Y. That explains the obligatory order of clauses (protasis + apodosis) in conditional copulative sentences because the conditional relation must be denoted iconically. 2. The protasis clause is always restrictive, which means that even the least part of the situation in the protasis is enough to lead to the situation in the apodosis, according to the model: only X (no more than X) is necessary for Y to occur. The intrinsic relation between the protasis and the apodosis results from this instance. Explication/implication of the meaning of restriction depends on the grammatical type of a given conditional construction. 3. The subject is prototypically generic. The predicate of the protasis clause is semantically (and often grammatically) impersonal, and the predicate of the apodosis clause is modal.

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