Athanasiadou, Angeliki & Dirven, Rene (2000) “Pragmatic Conditionals” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997. (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: Pgs. 1- 26. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Very often the term pragmatics is used only in relation to speech acts, but its original meaning, as specified by Charles Morris (1946), is much wider. Morris made the distinction between syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, such that each level involves different relations: syntactics specifies the relations between the signs themselves, semantics specifies the relations between signs and the world, and pragmatics specifies the relations between signs and their users. – 2

Whereas the logical conditionals involve analytical reasoning processes, and as a result the antecedent can only be preposed to the consequent, conversational conditionals involve speech acts in actual discourse or aspects of the discourse such as metalinguistic references to the linguistic choices made by the speakers and the antecedent tends to be postposed. – 5