Unreal conditional clause and independent clause of optative condition: Problems of grammatical status.

This contribution is a comparative study of two syntactic constructions: the unreal conditional hypotaxis (of the type If I knew this, I would not ask you about it) and the exclamatory clause encoding an optative condition (of the type If I only knew this!) in several Indo-European languages — and at various stages of their historical development. The research is aimed at following aspects: (a) the ascertainment of the types of convergent relations between grammatical signals encoding the postulated category of “distance” in its temporal and modal dimension and (b) the recognition of the syntactic status of the optative condition clause on the base of the analysis of its prosodic, typological, and semantic features in comparison with the protasis of the unreal conditional clause and with other types of syntagmas.