An Exploration of Conditional Clause Exegesis 383 force of ajllav is best represented using “yet” or “indeed” rather than “but”, since it does not introduce a statement opposite to v. 7, but one that stands against it in so far as it presents v. 7 as insufficient. The contrast is with the supposition that the problem Paul identifies in v. 7 is insignificant (100). This link can be represented using a paraphrase such as: “there are some who are distorting the gospel of Christ…yet even if we did such a thing, we would be worthy of the most serious punishment.” In this way Paul stresses that the authenticity of the gospel matters very much, and matters more than identity of the messenger. The indicative repetition in v. 9 is then used to stress the point in language that invites an altogether less hypothetical application. The block of material following the twin conditional statements of v. 8 and v. 9 is linked to it by gavr. While this may signal a logical connection, it is often used as a narrative marker equivalent to dev (101), with no particular causal force. The nature of the material in v. 10 suggests that rather than explaining or expanding the specific argument of vv. 8-9, it constitutes a separate comment (emotively expressed) on a broadly similar theme, which leads into the wider discussion initiated in vv. 12-13. III. A Pragmatic Approach to Conditional Clauses 1. Speech Acts and Illocutionary Force Semantic and syntactic analyses, though vital for exegesis, are not sufficient. A word, taken in isolation, does not have “a meaning” as such; it merely has a semantic field defined by the range of conventional usages in utterances (102). The same is true of a series of syntactically linked words. Such juxtaposition further constrains the semantic possibilities for each word, but does not firmly define their “meaning”. Therefore knowing everything about the semantics of third class conditions (for example) would not allow the “meaning” of a particular instance to be defined. The semantics, do, however, put limits on what the construction can conventionally be used for. The (100) Cf. BURTON, Galatians, 25; LONGENECKER, Galatians, 16. (101) BDAG, 189. (102) “Utterance” is here understood to refer to a particular instance of the use of a sentence (cf. P. COTTERELL – M. TURNER, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation [London 1989] 16).