Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals

Elder, Chi-Hé; Jaszczolt, Kasia M.

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2016.04.013

Cited by 22 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…With regard to the similarities, both sources identify two types of BCs: first, BCs that have conditional forms but communicate non-conditional primary meanings (direct BCs); and, second, BCs that have nonconditional forms and communicate non-conditional meanings (indirect BCs). Importantly, this classification comes to terms with Elder and Jaszczolt's (2016) classification of conditionals in the sense that direct and indirect BCs in this paper correlate with Elder and Jaszczolt's (C2) and (C4) categories of conditionals, respectively (see Subsection 2.5).…”

Section: Bcs Between the Holy Quran And The Qudsi Hadith: Similaritiementioning

confidence: 74%

“…These sources are: (i) word meaning and sentence structure (WS); (ii) world knowledge (WK); (iii) situation of discourse (SD); (iv) properties of human inferential system (IS); and (v) stereotypes and presumptions about society and culture (SC). These sources, according to Elder and Jaszczolt (2016), are responsible for generating the primary meanings (intended meaning) of the speaker. In the case of BCs, these primary meanings are non-conditional meanings arrived at by means of a number of default representations of utterances' contents that include, (i) compositional meaning of the sentence; (ii) cognitive defaults; (iii) conscious pragmatic inference; and (iv) social-cultural defaults (Jaszczolt, 2005, p. 57).…”

Section: Merger Representations and The Compositionality Of Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When Conditionals Lack Conditionality: The Semantics of Biscuit Conditionals in some Selected Texts from the Holy Quran and the Qudsi Hadiths: A Default Semantics-Theoretic Perspective

Khafaga¹

2019

CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education

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Section: Bcs Between the Holy Quran And The Qudsi Hadith: Similaritiementioning

confidence: 74%

Section: Merger Representations and The Compositionality Of Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Conditionals Lack Conditionality: The Semantics of Biscuit Conditionals in some Selected Texts from the Holy Quran and the Qudsi Hadiths: A Default Semantics-Theoretic Perspective

Khafaga¹

2019

CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education

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“…In the formal semantic literature, CCs as the English if are claimed to have no semantics in Kratzer's (1991) restrictor analysis of conditionals. The existing vast linguistic literature on the interpretation of conditionals (to just name a few, e.g., Iatridou, 1991;von Fintel, 1999von Fintel, , 2007von Fintel, , 2011Arregui, 2005;Grosz, 2012;Elder and Jaszczolt, 2016) shows effects of various factors (tense, mood, and polarity items) on the interpretation of conditionals, as well as the effect of CCs (e.g., Dostie, 1987;Léard, 1987on CCs in French, Montoliìo, 2000Schwenter, 2001 on CCs in Spanish, Ippolito and Su, 2014 on the Mandarin counterfactual CC yaobushi 'if-not' , Hoeksema, 2012 on unless and among many others, also Declerck and Reed, 2001 on a comprehensive analysis of conditionals in English and Breindl et al, 2014 on connectives in German).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German

Liu

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Logical connectives in natural language pose challenges to truth-conditional semantics due to pragmatics and gradience in their meaning. This paper reports on a case study of the conditional connectives (CCs) wenn/falls ‘if/when, if/in case’ in German. Using distributional evidence, I argue that wenn and falls differ in lexical pragmatics: They express different degrees of speaker commitment (i.e., credence) toward the modified antecedent proposition at the non-at-issue dimension. This contrast can be modeled using the speaker commitment scale (Giannakidou and Mari, 2016), i.e., More committed<WENN p, FALLS p>Less committed. Four experiments are reported which tested the wenn/falls contrast, as well as the summary of an additional one from Liu (2019). Experiment 1 tested the naturalness of sentences containing the CCs (wenn or falls) and conditional antecedents with varying degrees of likelihood (very likely/likely/unlikely). The starting prediction was that falls might be degraded in combination with very likely and likely events in comparison to the other conditions, which was not borne out. Experiment 2 used the forced lexical choice paradigm, testing the choice between wenn and falls in the doxastic agent’s conditional thought, depending on their belief or disbelief in the antecedent. The finding was that subjects chose falls significantly more often than wenn in the disbelief-context, and vice versa in the belief-context. Experiment 3 tested the naturalness of sentences with CCs and an additional relative clause conveying the speaker’s belief or disbelief in the antecedent. An interaction was found: While in the belief-context, wenn was rated more natural than falls, the reverse pattern was found in the disbelief-context. While the results are mixed, the combination of the findings in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 and that of Experiment 4a from Liu (2019) that falls led to lower speaker commitment ratings than wenn, provide evidence for the CC scale. Experiment 4b tested the interaction between two speaker commitment scales, namely, one of connectives (including weil ‘because’ and wenn/falls) and the other of adverbs (factive vs. non-factive, Liu, 2012). While factive and non-factive adverbs were rated equally natural for the factive causal connective, non-factive adverbs were preferred over factive ones by both CCs, with no difference between wenn and falls. This is discussed together with the result in Liu (2019), where the wenn/falls difference occurred in the absence of negative polarity items (NPIs), but disappeared in the presence of NPIs. This raises further questions on how different speaker commitment scales interact and why.

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“…Many sentences that do not even involve an if-clause, such as "Touch me and I will scream," are classied as indicative conditionals, while some "If w, ψ"-sentences are not. For more on this matter, see, e.g.,Elder and Jaszczolt (2016).d e l i b e rat i o n a l l y u s e l e s s c o n d i t i o n a l s e pi ste m e vo l um e 17-1…”

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confidence: 99%

Deliberationally Useless Conditionals

Krzyżanowska¹

2018

Episteme

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Decision theorists tend to treat indicative conditionals with reservation, because they can easily lead a deliberating agent astray. However, many indicatives can be very helpful in contexts of deliberation, so denying them all a role in such contexts seems to be overkill. We show that a recently revived inferential view on conditionals provides a straightforward explanation of why some indicatives are unassertable in contexts of deliberation and hints at a way of telling “deliberationally useless” and “deliberationally useful” conditionals apart.

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Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals

Cited by 22 publications

References 20 publications

When Conditionals Lack Conditionality: The Semantics of Biscuit Conditionals in some Selected Texts from the Holy Quran and the Qudsi Hadiths: A Default Semantics-Theoretic Perspective

When Conditionals Lack Conditionality: The Semantics of Biscuit Conditionals in some Selected Texts from the Holy Quran and the Qudsi Hadiths: A Default Semantics-Theoretic Perspective

Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German

Deliberationally Useless Conditionals

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