Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework
3.5. Conditionals and their Interpretation
3.5.1. Interpretive Traditions
3.5.1.1. Logical-Philosophical Framework
Philosophers working within this model have defined conditionals as any sentence having the form if P, (then) Q. Examples include:
(11) If there is a hurricane, the power will go out.
(12) If there was a hurricane, the power would go out.
(13) If there had been a hurricane, the power would have gone out.
Research by philosophers has mostly been limited to these types of the so-called
‘indicative’ conditionals because the semantics of the protasis are readily analyzable for their truth values and because “it is somehow assumed that the conditions for the truth of the conditional are those of material implication” (Inchaurralde 2005: 7). Truth conditions are illustrated in the following truth table, where P is the protasis and Q is the apodosis.
104 See also Dancygier (1998); Dancygier and Sweetser (2005); Johnson-Laird (1986).
Table 3.1: Truth Table
P Q P › Q
T T T
T F F
F T T
F F T
The problem regarding the analysis of conditional sentences in the philosophical-logical tradition is that material implication and truth conditions can only account for the so-called indicative conditionals. If counterfactuals are understood as material implication, there are whole classes of conditionals that are true from a logical standpoint, but unacceptable to speakers. This is because in material implication, conditionals are true whenever the consequent is true. Note the following sentence:
(14) If the activity on the moon is due to transformers arriving, the astronauts will find them.
Both speaker and logicians (see the truth table above) agree that if (15a) and (15b) are both true, then (14) is a true statement.
(15a) The activity on the moon is due to transformers arriving.
(15b) The astronauts will find them.
Note that in material implication, conditionals are true whenever Q is true and this implies that the existence of transformers and their arriving on the moon is irrelevant to the truth of the statement. Moreover, conditionals are true whenever the P is false. Consequently (14) is true whenever (15a) is false, regardless of whether the astronauts find the transformers. As far as material implication is concerned, the following is also acceptable:
(16) If white tea is blue, the astronauts will find the transformers.
Coulson (2001: 205) notes that “this discrepancy between truth and acceptability is particularly problematic for counterfactuals. . . . Because a counterfactual is by definition a conditional in which the antecedent is false, logically all counterfactuals are true statements.”
However, for speakers of a language, whether or not a conditional statement is analyzable via truth conditions is irrelevant. In fact, truth values are irrelevant to the interpretation of most kinds of conditionals commonly used in everyday conversation, as the examples (17)-(21)
demonstrate. This is why linguists’ (as opposed to philosophers and logicians) interest is not confined to those conditionals exhibiting material implication and analyzable for truth values. Examples of commonly used types of conditionals (i.e. natural language conditionals) that are unanalyzable in the logical-philosophical approach include:
(17) If you need any help finding a tie, my name is José.
(18) If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.
(19) If you are alone over Christmas, please come to our place for dinner.
(20) If I had simply been more careful, I would have seen the train.
(21) If you don’t go to your room right now, I swear I will ground you!
Many ם ִא conditionals are used in comparable ways to the examples above, and would be excluded from analysis under this framework. A few examples include:
(22) Exod. 1:16
ן ִ֣ ֶׁת ִמ ֲה ַו ֙אוּה ן ֥ ֵב־ם ִא If it is a boy, kill him.
(23) 2 Kgs. 2:1
ר ֶׁמא ַֹ֖י ַו ח ַּ֤ ָק ל י ִּ֜תֹא ה ִֶׁ֨א ְר ִת־ם ִא לוֹ ָּ֑א ְש ִל ָתי ִ֣ ִש ְק ִה
ן ִֵּ֔כ ִ֣ך ְל־י ָֽ ִה ְי ֙ךְ ָת ִא ָֽ ֵמ
He said, “What you ask is hard. If you see me taken from you, it will be so for you.”
(24) Gen. 30:27
ר ֶׁמא ַֹּ֤י ַו ךיָּ֑ ֶׁני ֵע ְב ן ַ֖ ֵח י ִתא ֥ ָצ ָמ אָׂ֛ ָנ־ם ִא ן ִָּ֔ב ָל ֙וי ָל ֵא
׃ך ָֽ ֶׁל ָל ְג ִב הַ֖ ָוה ְי י ִנ ֥ ֵכ ֲר ָב ְי ַו י ִת ְש ַֹּ֕ח ִנ
Laban said to him, “If I have found favor in your eyes, I discovered through divination that YHWH is blessing me because of you.”
Logicians and philosophers have responded to this critical deficiency by proposing context-sensitive possible worlds which “differ minimally from the actual world. This implies, first, that there are no differences between the actual world and the selected world except those that are required, implicitly or explicitly, by the antecedent,” (Stalnaker 1968: 104).
Despite recourse to analyses in terms of possible worlds, this framework is still not able to account for many of the common, every-day use of conditionals that most speakers employ.
The logical-philosophical framework is “widely recognized as less than adequate” for linguistic analysis (Ferguson, Snitzer Reilly, ter Meulen, Traugott 1986: 5). Dancygier and
Sweetser (2005: 8) agree, writing that in this framework “we are offered minimalist logical definitions of conditionality; but these do not seem helpful in examining natural language.”
In the end, as Sweetser (1990: 4) notes, “truth-conditional semantics eliminates cognitive organization from the linguistic system.”
3.5.1.2. Descriptive Framework
The central task here is “the analysis and presentation of aspects of the grammatical structure of a particular language or language variety, used by a given speech community located in space and time. The prime purpose of the descriptive linguistic approach is to determine the range of forms and their meanings . . . within languages” (Ferguson, Snitzer Reilly, ter Meulen, Traugott 1986: 4-5). This is the most familiar framework to biblical scholars because it is the framework commonly found in Biblical Hebrew and Greek grammars and lexicons and monographs such as Van Leeuwen (1973).105
As noted above, linguists are uneasy with and outright reject restricting the definition and study of conditionals to those that display material implication and are amenable to truth value semantic analyses.106 Minimally, the majority of linguists tend to identify prototypical conditionals with if-P, Q clauses and their clear semantic equivalents, comparing these to a well-described metalanguage such as English (Ferguson, Snitzer Reilly, ter Meulen, Traugott 1986: 6).107 Language specific syntactic, morphological, intonational108 and lexical markers are also used to identify conditionals. Additionally, constructions that lack overt markers but are semantically equivalent to conditionals are included in the category. For example, the sentence Go to the park, you’re in trouble, lacks any overt marker identifying it as a conditional.
However it is commonly construed as a conditional because of the iconic causal relationship between the clauses. (Note that the intonational pattern also promotes this construal.)
The vocabulary employed within this framework to describe different perceived degrees of hypotheticality varies considerably and there is little agreement between authors; newer works seem to only augment the number of labels.109 Terminological traditions include:
105 See discussion in Chapter 2.4.3.
106 See Danycgier (1998: 6); Dancygier and Sweetser (2005: 5); Ferguson, Snitzer Reilly, ter Meulen, Traugott (1986:
5); Podlesskaya (2001: 998).
107 See also Comrie (1986: 78); Dancygier (1998: 11); Fauconnier (1994: 111); Fillenbaum (1986: 179); I-Wen Su (2005:
656); Van der Auwera (1986: 199) as representative examples.
108 This is clearly not possible for BH, as it is no longer a spoken language. The use of the MT ta’amim as a gateway to the intonational prosody of spoken BH is, in my opinion, interesting, but since we have no access to speakers, conclusions will remain speculative.
109 See Dancygier (1998). See also, for instance, Declerck and Reed (2001: 1) “it became clear to us…that more distinctions were required to describe the type of possible world (e.g. ‘open’, ‘counterfactual’)….”
irrealis/realis, hypothetical,110 consequential, open/closed, indicative/subjunctive, potential, impossible/possible, epistemic,111 speech act,112 content,113 factual, inferential, course of event,114 pragmatic,115 contrary-to-fact or counterfactual, generic/habitual, and even biscuit conditionals,116to name a few. The labels most familiar to Hebrew studies include:
real/unreal/hypothetical/irreal/fulfillable/unfulfillable. 117
The analyses of ם ִא in the literature are all situated squarely within the descriptive framework;118 description based on degree of hypotheticality is all that has been provided and the function of ם ִא in conditionals and the other constructions in which the particle is used has not been a topic of discussion. Moreover, the descriptive categories for conditionals such as real/unreal/hypothetical, fulfillable/unfulfillable are themselves opaque and of little use when it comes to understanding the purposes for which they were used by the biblical writers.
A major theoretical concern with this classificatory system is that the difference between real, unreal and hypothetical is never defined with any precision. Whether it is possible to do so is highly questionable because by definition something that is hypothetical is not real. This has become so problematic that there is a move in the linguistic literature on conditionals away from classifying conditionals using hypotheticality terminology traditionally. In their major study of English conditionals Declerck and Reed (2001: 5) “decided to discard the term
‘hypothetical’ altogether, because it is used in too many different senses in the literature” in lieu of their own, more precise terminology.
Dancygier and Sweetser (2005) concur that the term is too vague and point out that all predictive content conditionals (typically categorized as real conditionals) are hypothetical in the sense that they “hypothesize a situation” (2005: 59). They also note that the term irrealis is equally imprecise and unhelpful because predictive conditionals are irrealis “in the sense that they do not portray situations as being a part of reality” (2005: 58). The protasis of some speech-act conditionals such as Exodus 1:16 תֹא ן ֶׁת ִמ ֲה ַו אוּה ן ֵב־ם ִאוֹ could also be covered by the term irrealis since the infant boys it is portraying are not yet born, and hence not part of reality
110 See Haiman (1978) and Schiffrin (1992).
111 See Sweetser (1990).
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid.
114 See Athanasiadou and Dirven (1997b).
115 Ibid.
116 Named after a J.L. Austin example, “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want some.” (DeRose and Grandy 1991: 405).
117 GKC (§159), IBHS (1990: 636-638), Van Leeuwen (1973).
118 The pertinent studies are reviewed in Chapter 2.
at the time of the utterance, yet few would be willing to classify this conditional as irrealis. So, the term irrealis, like hypothetical, does not make necessary distinctions that are crucial to differentiating between conditionals.119
A demonstrated, an additional problem with analyses that use “degree of certainty” or
“hypotheticality” to categorize ם ִא conditionals is that many conditionals are not used to speculate on the degree of possibility of fulfillment. For example, in speech-act conditionals,120 conditionality is, in essence, co-opted for the performance of the speech acts. Since “degree of hypotheticality” does not motivate the use of many conditionals, this study questions the validity of the schema that uses this as the basis for classifying conditionals and will test the alternative classification system introduced below.