A Gender Study On If-conditionals In British National Corpus

If-conditional is a complex linguistic phenomenon with syntactic structure,semantic relation and pragmatic environment,which draws much interest of many linguists.Different scholars have different classifications and explanations of if-conditional from different perspectives,such as logistics,psychology,pragmatics and genre,which makes a great achievement.However,there are few researches on if-conditional from the gender angle,which really requires an in-depth research.Therefore,this study aims to have a comprehensive research on if-conditional from the perspective of gender,exploring the different characteristics between British males and females when using if-conditionals.On the basis of corpus-based approaches,this study will find out the distinctive characteristics between genders when using if-conditionals with the aim of giving more enlightenment for teaching from these three aspects such as the ordering of if-clause in if-conditionals,the modal expression in main clauses and the types of if-conditionals by collecting the data from the BNC written corpus.This study is constituted by five chapters: the first chapter refers to the research background,research significance and aims,research questions as well as the overall organization;the second chapter is literature review concerning the relative theories and researches on if-conditionals aboard and at home;the third chapter introduces the research corpus,the research process and main problems needed to be resolved in next chapter;the fourth chapter mainly relates to the research results and analysis,trying to make an explanation for the difference between genders;the final chapter attaches importance to the conclusion,the enlightenment for if-conditionals' teaching and the limitation of this research.