Confusing Condition With Cause

Martin & Rose (2007: 131-2):

Other conjunctions that realise condition include if ..then, provided that, so long as:

If my life, that of my children and my parents was strangled,
then I would have done the same. 

I would have done the same
provided that there was no risk to my relaxed and comfortable way of life.

These are all conditions under which an event may happen. On the other hand, unless introduces conditions that close off the possibility of an event happening:

... the application should be dealt with in a public hearing
unless such a hearing was likely to lead to a miscarriage of justice

With concessive condition, an effect won’t occur even if a condition is met:

I would not have done the same
even if I had known the truth

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the primary clauses ('consequents') of conditional clause complexes are not limited to "events that happen", as demonstrated by:

• If it quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, unless marks negative condition: if not P then Q (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 477), and the primary clauses of negative conditions are not limited to "events that happen", as demonstrated by:

• Unless it quacks like a duck, it probably isn't a duck.

[3] To be clear, the meaning of concessive condition is if P then contrary to expectation Q.

[4] To be clear, the use of 'effect' here, along with the notion of events happening (or not) after a condition is met, betrays the authors' misconstrual of condition as a type of cause. 

Conditional statements are not statements of causality. An important distinction is that statements of causality require the antecedent to precede or coincide with the consequent in time, whereas conditional statements do not require this temporal order.