Abstract
Using the corpus of conversational Czech (Ortofon), we focus on a type of clausal insubordination introduced by the marker JESTLI 'if', a commonly occurring structure in conversational language. Previous research based purely on syntactic and conversational analysis, has proposed a spectrum of discourse functions associated with this pattern, including conventional expressions of speakers' subjective stance with differences in polarity: uncertainty about p vs. probability of not-p.
A preliminary prosodic probe confirms that each interpretation is associated with a distinct intonation pattern (roughly, slightly rising vs. sharply falling). The results support a constructional treatment of the patterns in question, linking together phonetic (segmental, prosodic), semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic properties, thereby also arguing for the need of elaborating a multimodal representational model that can integrate all these layers.