The present article examines asyndetic or conjunctionless conditionals in German and English. According to Jespersen’s Model (1940), this construction arose diachronically from a paratactic discourse sequence with a polar interrogative, but more recently Harris and Campbell (1995) have claimed that this model lacks any theoretical and empirical foundation. To demonstrate how asyndetic conditionals may emerge from discourse, this study reframes Jespersen’s Model in grammaticalization terms and adduces several constructional features in order to show that a grammaticalization process has actually taken place. In particular, this is achieved by applying traditional grammaticalization parameters such as bondedness, paradigmatic variability and specialization to synchronic and diachronic variation patterns with regard to clause integration, the finite verb of the protasis and the possible-world categories realis, potentialis, irrealis. The article also explores the relevance of speech-situation evocation to the formation of interrogative-based conditionals.

The present paper contrasts verb-first (= V1-)conditionals in written usage in present-day English and German. Based on the hypothesis that V1-protases originated in independent interrogatives and then grammaticalized as conditional subordinate clauses in an asynchronous fashion in both languages, we use data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) to investigate the lexical overlap of V1-protases with interrogatives and their functional overlap with 'if-/wenn'-conditionals. The results show, inter alia, that English V1-conditionals are highly divergent from polar interrogatives and occupy a functional niche with respect to 'if-'conditionals, with their German counterparts showing more transitional characteristics in both respects; they also suggest a special role for V1-protases with 'should/sollte' in expressing a subtype of neutral, rather than tentative, conditionality. Finally, prospects are discussed for future research regarding possible synchronic (i.e. discourse-functional) and diachronic (i.e. systemic) motivations for the differences and similarites observed between V1-conditionals in the two present-day languages.

While concessives are well-known for their special semantic characteristics, most research has so far been oriented towards hypotactic construction types (although etc.). The present article seeks to complement this trend by investigating the paratactic zwar … aber-construction in German (roughly equivalent to English 'true … but'), with a special focus on its patterns of variation. The aim is to document important aspects of this variation from a combined qualitative/ quantitative perspective. The basic thesis is that zwar … aber constitutes the core instantiation of an emergent constructional schema zwar … aber whose surface variation is structured in a prototype-like fashion. Several functional regularities and statistical correlations are analysed and discussed from the point of view of grammaticalisation theory. The data consist of ca. 10,000 parsed tokens of zwar, mainly from newspaper usage, in the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo).

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