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98 JANA KESSELOVÁOperators of the Conditional Relations in Contemporary Slovak Language(Corpora Inspirations)SummaryIn time when the complex works on Slovak morphology and syntax present the conjunctionseither as the set of means for expressing the certain relation or as the enumerationof relations that are expressed by particular conjunctions we tried to show, based onthe example of the conditional operators, that conjunctions (and other conjunction expression,i.e. operators) are not just the means for creating the inter-sentence relations, butthat they create the communicative function of the utterances in harmony with collocations,functional sentence perspective, predicative verb categories, type of the contextualinter-sentence relation and the context. The traditionally defined and delimited role ofthe conditional operators in language interaction – to function as a means of inter-sentenceconditional relation – is frequently obscured and its pragmatic role – to co-createthe communication function of the utterance and to fulfill the cooperation and politenessprinciple of the communication comes forth.The analysis is based exclusively on the utterances that were used in the written textsof the scientific, journalistic and poetic/literary style, that are the part of the Slovaknational corpus (version prim 2.1 bal).In connection with the communication-orientated understanding of the conditionaloperators our attention is focused on three aspects of their functioning in communication:– conditional operators as indicators of the semantic relation among the contents of theutterances of the type ak x, y/keby x, y (if x,y in real conditions/ if x,y in unreal conditions);– conditional operators as indicators of the attitudes of the speakers and various communicationfunctions of the utterances of the type if x, y/even if x, y;– reasons of the communication preferences of the explicit conditional conjunctionexpressions.Communicative approach to the conditional operators points also at the terminologycontradiction of the traditional terms main-subordinate clause on one hand and the termstheme-rheme on the other side. As the conjunction expressions research showed themost important part (as to the content) of the utterance is in the so-called subordinateclause and the main clause usually presents the less important part of the utterance.