“If They Are Not, This Is Unnecessary”: Examining the Avoidance of “Then” after “If ” in Women-Authored Texts

Abstract

This study examines the uses of “then” in “if... then...” structures, with a particular focus in their use (of lack thereof) by women authors, the evolution in their use over time and whether these uses are linguistically prompted or not. To do so, CHET, CECheT and COWITE, three corpora of eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts including texts on history, chemistry and mostly recipes, will be examined, and cases will be manually disambiguated and analysed. The results will show how the distribution of the use “if... then...” structures depends on both socio-historical and linguistic constraints, with a first stage in which its use is freer, reflecting its widespread use in the scholastic tradition, and a later phase in which the use is mostly reserved to linguistically and contextually prompted cases, mostly to avoid ambiguity and after long or complex conditional clauses. The apparent preference of women authors to avoid “if... then...” structures is confirmed, with the cause hypothesized as a reflection of
their experiencing a lighter scholastic influence.