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Jordan Journal of Applied Science-Humanities Series

DOI

https://doi.org/10.35192/jjoas-h.v29i1.7

Abstract

This paper provides corpus evidence to demonstrate that ‘unless’ clauses function like exceptive constructions (ECs). It adopts Galal et al. (2019) classification of ECs into two categories: paradigmatic ECs (connected/regular exceptive) and hypotactic ECs (free exceptive). The current analysis applies this classification to ‘unless’ clauses to examine their behavior. Corpus evidence shows that unless clauses consistently occupy a fixed position relative to their antecedent, similar to paradigmatic ECs. However, the two constructions differ in that ‘unless’ clauses occur before the antecedent regardless of the position of the consequent (the statement), whereas paradigmatic ECs occur after the antecedent. Additionally, unless allows both universal and non-universal quantifiers, with universal quantifiers being more commonly used. Regarding coordinating sequences, ‘unless’ accepts coordination similar to hypotactic ECs. Some statistical analyses of the use of ‘unless’ conditionals in two native corpora—the Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC)—are presented. These analyses show that ‘unless’ is more frequently used in BNC, suggesting a characteristic of British English. Results demonstrate that this construction is more common in the written proportions of COCA, whereas it is more frequently used in the spoken portions of BNC. ‘Unless’ conditionals are more often used with a free verb in the from-combination and are rarely used with Types II and III (counterfactuals), supporting the notion that unless does not typically occur with counterfactuals.

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© 2025 by the author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 Attribution license.