The real interpretations of ‘if’ in academic texts: A study of the possibilities corresponding to the conditional in a psychology paper

Johnson-Laird and Byrne proposed in 2002 that, beyond the two traditional interpretations that are assigned to if, that is, the material and the biconditional ones, eight more combinations of possibilities related to their meaning can be attributed to this kind of sentences. The initial hypothesis in the present study is that not all of those ten interpretations should be usual in academic texts, since some of them resort, for example, to figurative language or irony. In this way, a study of a psychology paper is carried out in order to check that hypothesis. The results are that, at least in that paper, the uses of if tend to be linked to the interpretation that both Johnson-Laird and Byrne and the literature in general relate to the biconditional.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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