Coding the Hypothetical: A Comparative Typology of Russian and Macedonian Conditionals (review)

Macedonian and Russian provide the basis for a particularly fruitful comparison here since Russian possesses one of the simplest formal expressions of conditional meaning among Slavic languages, and Macedonian one of the most complex. Jane Hacking has written the best English-language description of biclausal conditional sentences for either of these languages and, in fact, makes certain advances beyond existing studies by native Slavic linguists. Earlier descriptions of the Russian or Macedonian conditional tended to focus either on formal or on semantic characteristics alone, missing important points about which conditional meanings are actually formally distinguished. This study is superior in not assuming any isomorphism between the formal and semantic aspects of grammatical expression. Also, rather than using the traditional Jakobsonian estimation of ‘aspect’ and ‘mood’ as subjective and ‘status’ as objective qualities of the narrated event (Roman Jakobson, ‘Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb’, Russian and Slavic grammar: 41–58, Amsterdam: Mouton, 1957), H adopts definitions proposed by Howard Aronson (‘Interrelationships between aspect and mood in Bulgarian’, Folia Slavica 1/1:9–32, 1977). Following Aronson, she argues that aspect provides an objective quantification of the narrated event, mood an objective qualification, and status the subjective qualification. She further argues that tense, aspect, and mood—as objective components of event narration—tend to be only partly discrete (8). H discusses how these grammatical categories interact to express conditional meaning from both a general typological perspective and from the point of view of Russian and Macedonian as individual language systems. Her focus is thus theoretical and crosslinguistic as well as descriptive and particular at the same time.

The book is divided into five chapters, including an introduction setting out theoretical preliminaries, goals, and limitations (1–14). H considers only sentences consisting of a protasis (the clause conveying the if-condition) and an apodosis (the main clause, conveying the then-entailment), though the protasis need not actually contain any subordinating conjunction ‘if’. All examples are gleaned from contemporary newspapers and journals (listed on p. 154) and represent ‘Codified Literary Russian’ (as described in Natalja Jul’ evna Shvedova and Vladimir Vladimirovich Lopatin, Russkaja grammatika [Russian grammar], Moscow: Russkij jazyk, 1990) or ‘Standard Macedonian’ (as codified by Blaže Koneski, Grammatika na makedonskiot literaturen jazyk [Grammar of literary Macedonian], Skopje: Kultura, 1967). H stresses that her collection of examples is not intended as statistically meaningful but merely as representative of the grammatical patterns that exist as part of the contemporary norm (12).

Ch. 2 (15–46) contains a rather lengthy critique of previous work on the Russian conditional, while Ch. 3, ‘Morphosyntactic and semantic features of Russian conditionals’ (47–89), adds H’s alternative analysis. Ch. 4 (90–127) deals with Macedonian conditional sentences together with the published literature analyzing them, and Ch. 5 (129–41) provides a conclusion and brief typological overview. H regards the Russian conditional as conveying a basic distinction between ‘expectative’ and ‘nonexpectative’ meaning. The latter subsumes counterfactual as well as potential meaning and is expressed with the help of the particle b i , normally appearing once in each clause. Macedonian conveys the same functional distinction but uses a more varied assortment of conjunctions and verb forms and does not mark ‘nonexpectativeness’ in both clauses, in contrast to Russian and other typologically unmarked expressions of irreal or unrealizable conditional meaning.

H’s argumentation is sound, her knowledge of the literature impressive, and her presentation well-organized and nicely illustrated with appropriate examples. At times, however, she stops short of taking her analysis a useful step further, though such instances always involve issues peripheral to her main goals. For instance, H provides many excellent examples of Russian nonexpectative conditional sentences containing imperative or infinitive rather than past-tense forms in the protasis to demonstrate that the preterite itself cannot be the primary vehicle for expressing the conditional or subjunctive mood. But she does not provide any functional motivation...