Focus on the irrefutable: A closer look at the main clause of the Russian universal concessive conditional

For the aims of this paper we will discuss a type of concessive construction usually referred to as “universal concessive conditional (henceforth UCC). The apodosis of a UCC typically contains a strong or even irrefutable statement, which goes against the expectations of the hearer. Therefore we may expect the main clause of these constructions to contain elements that contribute to its meaning, such as aspectual adverbs (e.g. vse že in (1) ), universal adverbs (e.g. vsegda ‘always’, nikogda ‘never’), focus particles (e.g. odin ‘only’), and comparative quantifiers (e.g. bol’še ‘more’). We will describe the use of these elements based on a synchronic corpus study and try to account for their contribution to the meaning of the construction as a whole and to the pragmatic function of the UCC.Key words: concessive conditionals, clause integration, corpus analysisstatus: publishe