Project Details
Projekt
Semantics and Pragmatics of Conditionals: form Sentence to Discourse
Applicant
Professorin Maribel Romero, Ph.D.
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2012 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 185153653
P2 investigates the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics in conditionals. We explore this question in three domains: at the sentence level, at the discourse level, and at the interface with epistemology.At the sentence level, continuing the research initiated in the first funding period, we will examine the morphological composition of the full paradigm of conditional constructions and investigate how surface differences lead to differences in truth and/or felicity conditions. We will explain why some kinds of conditional systematically but cancellably generate the infor-mation that their antecedents are unlikely, why other kinds systematically (and only sometimes cancellably) generate the information that their antecedents are false, and why the remaining kinds are not systematically attended by either kind of information.At the discourse level we engage the debate over strict and variably strict analyses of conditionals. There are two arguments in favor of a strict analysis: (i) Sobel sequences and (ii) Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing. The strict conditional explanation of Sobel sequences has recently been challenged by novel data. We will pursue an explanation for conditional sequences in terms of implicatures, rhetorical relations and information structure which has the potential to explain all of the available data. von Fintel¿s NPI argument for a strict analysis of conditionals relies on a widely successful generalization that explains NPI-licensing in other domains. However, the key ingredient that is added in extending the account to conditionals threatens to undermine its success in some domains: non-adnominal only and focus-sensitive regret and surprise. We investigate how the focus-sensitivity of these constructions can be modelled while at the same time licensing NPIs as in von Fintel`s analysis.At the interface with epistemology, we study the interaction between conditionals, epistemic modals, and evidentials to develop tools that will help bridge a gap between semantics and epistemology. Epistemologists are concerned with modelling how individuals change their beliefs in the light of new information. Conditionals play a special role in such theories. However, existing theories of the dynamics of belief by epistemologists have taken conditionals to lack truth values. This raises the embedding problem: if conditionals lack truth conditions, how do we explain the interpretability of complex sentences with conditional components? We expect fruit from studying conditionals together with evidentials and epistemic modals because the members of all three classes of lexical items (i) contribute information about the likelihood of their proposition and (ii) are syntactically embeddable, though in an interestingly restricted way.
DFG Programme
Research Units
