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syntactic analysis - Is "if you're not familiar with X, it is..." or "if you're not aware, X is..." correct English?


More and more often I read sentences such as the following:



  • If you're not familiar with Miami's “Golden Era”, this film captures it brilliantly.

  • If you're not aware of the basics, two teams of five players spawn on corners of a map.

  • If you're not familiar with it, Pinboard is a bookmarking service that lets you save URLs.

  • If you're not aware of how to transfer funds from your Main wallet to your Australian wallet, this explains how:

  • In case you're wondering, mBio wasn't fooled.

  • In case you don't know Marco, he was one of Masahiko Kimura's first apprentices.


Are they correct? Why? If they are not, then what is wrong, and how can they be best corrected?



P.S. By "correct" I mean do they follow Standard English and English Grammar?


P.P.S. Although they're harder to find, I found more examples in the New York Times! Publication in the NYT means these sentence structures are correct, right?



  • If you’re not familiar with this little tweak, it’s simple.

  • If you’re not familiar with your provider’s policy, New York’s Department of Financial Services publishes a helpful chart.

  • In case you're wondering, the rupiah is the national currency of Indonesia.



Answer



The examples in the OP's post:




  • If you're not familiar with Miami's “Golden Era”, this film captures it brilliantly.

  • If you're not aware of the basics, two teams of five players spawn on corners of a map.

  • If you're not familiar with it, Pinboard is a bookmarking service that lets you save URLs.

  • If you're not aware of how to transfer funds from your Main wallet to your Australian wallet, this explains how:

  • In case you're wondering, mBio wasn't fooled.


  • In case you don't know Marco, he was one of Masahiko Kimura's first apprentices.




  • If you’re not familiar with this little tweak, it’s simple.



  • If you’re not familiar with your provider’s policy, New York’s Department of Financial Services publishes a helpful chart.

  • In case you're wondering, the rupiah is the national currency of Indonesia.



*


It seems that the above examples in the OP's post could be considered to involve speech act-related adjuncts and/or relevance protases (of conditional constructions).


.


For instance, in CGEL, in their section "18 Speech act-related adjuncts", page 773:



  • "The adjuncts considered in this section are more peripheral than any treated so far, inasmuch as they relate not to the situation or proposition expressed in the clause but to the speech act performed in uttering the clause (or to the speech act that is expected as a response). For this reason, they do not have any bearing on the truth value of the statement expressed in the residue."


and then within the subsection "Purpose, reason, concession, and condition", page 774:



  • "There are various other kinds of adjunct that can relate to the speech act as well as functioning ordinarily to give information about the situation described in the clause."


and they give the example,



  • [3.iii] Dick's coming to the party, in case you're interested.


with the explanation,



  • "Similarly in [iii] I'm telling you that Dick's coming to the party because of the possibility that you may be interested."


Notice how their example [3.iii] is very similar to the OP's example "In case you're wondering, mBio wasn't fooled."


They also give the example,



  • [3.v] If you must know, I wasn't even short-listed.


with the comment,



  • "Finally in [v] we have a conditional adjunct: "If you must know, I'll tell you that …"


Their example [3.v] appears to be somewhat similar to many of the OP's examples, except that its protasis ("if P") happens to not contain a negative.


.


In CGEL, in their section "Open conditional constructions", they have a small subsection on "Relevance protases". It seems to be related to many of your examples (except that in their two examples, the protases happen to not contain negatives--though, I don't think that should make any difference). I'll put here the whole part that deals with this topic since it is rather small and the info rather compacted. On page 740:



Relevance protases


One further special case where Q is not a consequence of P involves 'relevance protases':


[6]




  • i. [If you need some help], Helen is willing to lend a hand.




  • ii. [If you're interested], Dick's coming to the party too.




Here Q is true independently of whether P is true. Nevertheless, such examples are consistent with the invariant meaning of if, which excludes only the case where Q is false and P true. In uttering [6] I'm asserting Q, with P expressing a condition on the relevance of Q. Such examples might be regarded as a shorthand way of saying something like If you need some help [you will be interested to know that] Helen is willing to lend a hand or If you're interested [it is worth telling you that] Dick is coming to the party. There is thus some implicit predication in which the actually expressed Q is an argument.



A similar type of paraphrasing can probably be done with many of the OP's examples. For instance, for the example "If you're not familiar with Miami's 'Golden Era', this film captures it brilliantly", that could perhaps be reasonably paraphrase as: "If you're not familiar with Miami's 'Golden Era' [and are interested in that era then you might like to know that] this film captures it brilliantly".


.


Note that CGEL is the 2002 reference grammar by Huddleston and Pullum et al., The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.


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