loogikalause

Loogikalause is a term used in Finnish to denote a sentence that expresses a logical proposition. The word combines looginen, meaning logical, with lause, meaning sentence. In logic and related disciplines, a loogikalause can be any declarative statement that can be assigned a truth value, true or false.

In formal logic, loogikalauseet are built from atomic propositions using connectives such as conjunction (and), disjunction (or), negation (not), and implication. In first-order logic, quantifiers like for all and there exists extend the range of possible statements. When such sentences are represented for mechanical processing, they are often transformed into clausal form: a clause is a disjunction of literals, and a conjunction of clauses corresponds to the original formula. For example, the natural-language sentence “If it rains, the ground is wet” can be represented as P → Q, which in clausal form becomes ¬P ∨ Q.

Loogikalauseet are distinguished from everyday natural-language sentences by their emphasis on truth conditions and formal expressibility. In linguistics and philosophy, the term is used to discuss the logical structure of sentences and their interpretation, rather than merely their syntactic form.

Related topics include propositional logic, first-order logic, and clausal form (CNF). The concept plays a central role in logic education, automated reasoning, and the semantic analysis of language.