Conditional perfection: the truth and the whole truth

Herburger, Elena

doi:10.3765/salt.v25i0.3079

Cited by 23 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As outlined above, CP has been discussed extensively as a property of various types of indicative conditionals (among others, Atlas and Levinson, 1981;Newstead, 1997;Van Der Auwera, 1997;Evans and Twyman-Musgrove, 1998;von Fintel, 2001;Dieussaert et al, 2002;Franke, 2007;Van Canegem-Ardijns and Van Belle, 2008;Herburger, 2015;Lauer, 2015;Goebel, 2017). By contrast, CP in counterfactual conditionals has received less attention (but cf.…”

Section: Conditional Perfectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals

Schwab

Liu

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Both indicative and counterfactual conditionals are known to be licensing contexts for negative polarity items (NPIs). However, a recent theoretical account suggests that the licensing of attenuating NPIs like English all that in the conditional antecedent is sensitive to pragmatic differences between various types of conditionals. We conducted three behavioral experiments in order to test key predictions made by that proposal. In Experiment 1, we tested hypothetical indicative and counterfactual conditionals with the English NPI all that, finding that the NPI is degraded in the former compared to the latter. In Experiment 2, we compared hypothetical indicative conditionals and premise conditionals with the same NPI, again finding a degradation only for the former. Both results align with theoretically derived predictions purporting that hypothetical indicative conditionals are degraded due to their susceptibility to conditional perfection. Finally, Experiment 3 provides empirical evidence that comprehenders readily strengthen counterfactual conditionals to biconditionals, in line with theoretical analyses that assume that conditional perfection and counterfactual inferences are compatible. Their ability to still host attenuating NPIs in the conditional antecedent, by contrast, falls into place via the antiveridical inference to the falsity of the antecedent. Altogether, our study sheds light on the interplay between NPI licensing and the semantic and pragmatic properties of various types of conditionals. Moreover, it provides a novel perspective on the processing of different kinds of conditionals in context, in particular, with regard to their (non)veridicality properties.

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Section: Conditional Perfectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proposals have ranged from treating it as scalar implicature (Van Der Auwera, 1997), Q-based implicature(Horn, 2000), R-based implicature(Atlas and Levinson, 1981), or quantity implicature based on the exhaustivity of answers(von Fintel, 2001). Refer toHerburger (2015) for an overview.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals

Schwab

Liu

2022

Front. Psychol.

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“…So under the assumptions made about zhi and you here, both insufficiency and necessity can be derived on the basis of overt material. This transparency should not be taken for granted: it has proven quite difficult to derive the necessity-implication exhibited by English only if conditionals in a compositional fashion (von Fintel 1997;Herburger 2015Herburger , 2016Herburger , 2019. The quantificational force of such conditionals does not manifest itself overtly.…”

Section: Zhi-youmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thinking of these relations as semantic features [±suff] and [±nec], respectively, zhiyao can be described as [+suff,-nec], and zhiyou as [-suff,+nec]. A diagnostic applied by Herburger (2016Herburger ( , 2019 enables us to add substance to this claim. If for a given conditional if p q, where if is just a placeholder for a given conditional connective, you cannot felicitously follow up doubting that p makes q true, you have evidence for sufficiency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

zhi-{yao, you} ‘only-{need, have}’: on two conditional connectives in Mandarin

Wimmer¹

2022

J East Asian Linguist

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This paper offers a compositional take on two internally complex conditional connectives in Mandarin, zhi-yao ‘only-need’ and zhi-you ‘only-have’. While the former conveys the antecedent proposition’s minimal sufficiency, the latter conveys its necessity for the consequent proposition to come true. Both connectives will be treated as pairing an exclusive particle, zhi, with a modal, an assumption that is less controversial for the necessity modal yao than for you, which will be treated as a possibility modal. Accepting this treatment, however, we have two connectives that openly differ in modal force. While the surface order will be preserved for zhi-you, an inversion will be shown to lead to better results for zhi-yao. In both cases, a possible extension to monoclausal uses is considered.

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“…For us any way of getting to the conditional perfection interpretation will give rise to the desired projection property discussed above. For instance, we could assume any account of conditional perfection among Ducrot 1969;Matsumoto 1995;van der Auwera 1997;von Fintel 2001;Franke 2011;Herburger 2015 among others.…”

Section: The Account In More Detailmentioning

confidence: 99%

Satisfied or exhaustified: an ambiguity account of the Proviso Problem

Romoli¹

2016

SALT

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The presuppositions inherited from the consequent of a conditional or the second disjunct of a disjunction oscillate between a conditional and a nonconditional inference, depending on the context. This is problematic for most theories of presupposition projection in the literature, which only predict a conditional presupposition for such sentences (Karttunen 1974;Stalnaker 1973;Heim 1983;Beaver 2001;Schlenker 2009; Fox 2008 among others). The general response to this problem, the so-called 'Proviso Problem' (Geurts 1996), is to assume that in addition to the basic conditional presupposition, a non-conditional inference can arise depending on the relationship between the antecedent/first disjunct and the presupposition of the consequent/second disjunct. We discuss data for which this solution makes the wrong predictions. Similar data have been taken by van der Sandt (1992), Geurts (1996) and Garcia-Odon (2012) to motivate the DRT-approach to presuppositions. Schlenker (2011), however, has raised various arguments against such an approach. We propose an alternative analysis, which doesn't have those problems. In our analysis, the differing presuppositions are the result of a systematic ambiguity involving exhaustification in a trivalent semantics: a non-conditional presupposition obtains with exhaustification, and a conditional one without. Independently motivated plausibility considerations decide which reading is chosen with no direct selection of presuppositions needed. We discuss how this approach deals with the various cases of proviso and the predictions it makes for biconditional sentences.

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Conditional perfection: the truth and the whole truth

Cited by 23 publications

References 27 publications

Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals

Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals

zhi-{yao, you} ‘only-{need, have}’: on two conditional connectives in Mandarin

Satisfied or exhaustified: an ambiguity account of the Proviso Problem

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