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relevance conditional

relevance conditional noun: a subordinate clause, usually introduced by if, that asserts the relevance of the clause to the main clause of the sentence, but not that it entails the main clause; a construction involving such a clause.

Noun

relevance conditional (plural relevance conditionals)

  1. A subordinate clause, usually introduced by if, that asserts the relevance of the clause to the main clause of the sentence, but not that it entails the main clause; a construction involving such a clause.
    • To be more precise, the speaker of a relevance conditional assumes a mutual understanding on the parts of the speaker and the addressee[s] that the actualization of P is a sufficient condition for the relevance of the Q-utterance.2001, Renaat Declerck, Susan Reed, Conditionals: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis, page 425
    • For example, relevance conditionals are constructions in conditional shape that do not seem to express a clear conditional meaning at first glance. This has led semanticists to introduce analyses of relevance conditionals that capture many of their properties but are very specific to this...2013, Tatjana Scheffler, Two-dimensional Semantics: Clausal Adjuncts and Complements, Walter de Gruyter, page 124

Forms of relevance conditional

pluralrelevance conditionals

Questions about relevance conditional

What does relevance conditional mean?
Relevance conditional means a subordinate clause, usually introduced by if, that asserts the relevance of the clause to the main clause of the sentence, but not that it entails the main clause; a construction involving such a clause.
What part of speech is relevance conditional?
Relevance conditional is a noun.
What is the plural of relevance conditional?
The plural of relevance conditional is relevance conditionals.

Words near relevance conditional in the dictionary

  1. relettering
  2. reletters
  3. reletting
  4. relettings
  5. relevance
  6. relevance conditional
  7. relevance conditionals
  8. relevance logic
  9. relevance logics
  10. relevances
  11. relevancies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: relevance conditional (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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