Fictional Threatening: The Case Of Disjunctive Conditionals

Abstract

In the present paper, we extend previous work on the speech act of threatening by including in our analysis a corpus of crime fiction based on 700 English books, a characteristic trait of which are threats. By including data derived from written narratives in prose, imaginary rather than factual, this research aims to identify potential differences between fictional and authentic threats, thus contributing to the general panorama of this speech act. Here we concentrate on a single construction, known as disjunctive conditional or pseudo‑imperative, which is analysed in terms of parameters employed in previous studies and modified to meet the purposes on the present research.