The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy

Abstract

This paper accounts for the epistemic use of the conditional in polar questions in French. It is argued that polar questions modalised by the epistemic conditional are biased questions that serve an argumentative function, and that the conditional contributes a different commitment update in interrogatives and in questioning declaratives. The bias type depends on whether the question is interrogative or declarative. In interrogatives, the epistemic conditional is generally associated with the subject clitic-verb inversion pattern. This pattern is argued to routinely convey evidential bias, while evidential bias is determined by the context in est-ce que questions. As biased polar questions in the conditional do not undergo interrogative flip, the conjectural meaning conveyed by the combination of the conditional and questioning is reported to be an evidential extension in keeping with evidentiality in non-flip languages (Bhadra, Diti. 2020. The semantics of evidentials in questions. Journal of Semantics 37. 367–423). This might shed new light on the apparent conceptual puzzle posed by the shift in meaning of the epistemic conditional in assertions and in questions.