Two Types of Conditional Clauses in German

Based on the linguistic theory known as Form-Content Analysis which asserts that a difference in form should always be taken as a difference in meaning, the present analysis is concerned with the two types conditional clauses in German: conditional clauses introduced by “wenn” and conditional clauses beginning with the finite verb. While traditional grammar books introduce both types of conditional clauses as if they were identical in meaning and, therefore, interchangeable, the present study shows, in terms of actual quantitative data, that their distribution is not random and that they are distributed in accordance with the meanings of the signals involved.