Deontic commitments in conditional promises and threats: towards an exemplar semantics for conditionals

Abstract

a b st r a c tThis paper studies two types of cognitive factors which have been assumed to underpin people's interpretation of conditional promises and threats: logic and socio-cognitive assumptions about what conditional promisors and threateners are obliged and permitted to do. We consider whether the logic of conditionals is compatible with the socio-cognitive assumptions underlying their interpretation or whether the two come apart. From the classical logical accounts of conditionals, almost all modern theories have inherited a constraint which specifies that a conditional cannot be true if its antecedent is true and consequent false. This logical constraint is widely assumed to constitute, at least partially, a conditional's semantics, or 'core meaning'. A replication of Beller et al. 's (2005) study, reported in this paper, calls for revisiting this longstanding, cross-theoretically assumed constraint. As predicted, we have found that, in English, conditional promises are generally consistent with this logical constraint, but threats are not. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of a new usage-based category of conditional threats, and support the claim that the observed logical asymmetry in the interpretation of conditional promises versus threats is just an[*] We are extremely grateful to Sieghard Beller for providing us with the German versions of the 2005 questionnaires. We would like to thank Linda Walz for translation and Stephanie Foxton, Arianna Nargis Hussain, and Tilly Flint, our student research assistants, for their help with the data collection. Our thanks also go to Andrew Merrison for discussions about the questionnaires and to York St John University for sponsoring various stages of this project with funding from the Student Researchers Scheme and the Ad Hoc Fund. Finally, we are grateful to Language and Cognition's reviewers and editors for extremely useful comments, which have helped improve this paper.terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.

Intercultural pragmatics in the Global Englishes context: Some implications for developing intercultural communicative competence

“…In Beller et al's (2005) study, there were 66 students, 34 of whom were male and 32 female, with the mean age of 22.7 years (age range 20-32). 70 students took part in Sztencel and Clarke's (2018) study, 34 of whom were male and 36 female, with a mean age 20.1 years (age range [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. In what follows, I focus on one of the tasks that the participants in both studies completed, namely the formulation task, which I explain below.…”

“…But can we be sure that this variation is due to the cross-cultural differences in social conventions? Sztencel and Clarke (2018) voice a concern about attempts to interpret these differences in cross-cultural terms. First, unlike the participants in Beller et al's (2005) and Sztencel and Clarke's (2018) studies, Beller and Bender's (2004) Tongan participants were secondary school students with the mean age of 15.4.…”

“…Sztencel and Clarke (2018) voice a concern about attempts to interpret these differences in cross-cultural terms. First, unlike the participants in Beller et al's (2005) and Sztencel and Clarke's (2018) studies, Beller and Bender's (2004) Tongan participants were secondary school students with the mean age of 15.4. Thus, a feasible interpretation of the difference is that the older German and English students were more successful at disregarding their the socio-linguistic conventions for the purpose of engaging in the formulation task.…”