‘If-Then’: A Case Study in Logico-Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Can logico-lingustic theory actually be applied in a practical way to analyze and explain significant natural-language phenomena? As an illustration of how the theory reduces to practice a case study will now be made consisting of a detailed logico-linguistic analysis of a particular natural-language device. The device selected for the study is the if-then construction of everyday English.

“In this very thing, which the dialecticians teach among the elements of their art, how one ought to judge whether an argument be true or false which is connected in this manner, ’If it is day, it shines’, how great a contest there is; — Diodorus has one opinion, Philo another, Chrysippus a third. Need I say more?”

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