The elastic nonveridicality property of indicative conditionals

Liu, Mingya

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2019-0007

Cited by 13 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“… Kadmon and Landman (1993) , for instance, argue that licensed NPIs create a strengthening effect of the statement. In a recent paper, Liu (2019) reports on experimental evidence that licensed NPIs in conditionals express a lower degree of speaker credence toward the antecedent (e.g., if this has ever been done before vs. if this has been done before ). We leave these pragmatic aspects aside because they address the interpretive effects of licensed NPIs and are thus less relevant for the licensing question of NPIs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel ERP Evidence for Processing Differences Between Negative and Positive Polarity Items in German

2019

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One unresolved question about polarity sensitivity in theoretical linguistics concerns whether and to what extent negative and positive polarity items are parallel. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), previous studies found N400 and/or P600 components for negative and positive polarity violations with inconsistent results. We report on an ERP study of German polarity items. Both negative and positive polarity violations elicited biphasic N400/P600 effects relative to correct polarity conditions. Furthermore, negative polarity violations elicited a P600-only effect relative to positive polarity violations. The lack of a graded N400 effect indicates that both kinds of violations involve similar semantic processing costs. We attribute the increase in P600 amplitude of negative polarity violations relative to positive polarity violations to their different nature: the former are syntactic anomalies triggering structural reanalysis, whereas the latter are pragmatic oddities inducing discourse reanalysis. We conclude that negative and positive polarity violations involve at least partly distinct mechanisms.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel ERP Evidence for Processing Differences Between Negative and Positive Polarity Items in German

2019

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“…14A detailed summary of Giannakidou’s (1999) theory of NPI licensing as veridicality sensitivity is beyond the scope of this paper, but see Giannakidou (2000) and Liu (2019) for this, and see Liu (2019) for an experimental investigation of NPI licensing in conditionals which can be taken to support this theory.…”

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confidence: 99%

Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap

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Lukyanenko

2019

Front. Psychol.

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Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as the news anchor didn’t warn nobody about the floods (meaning “the news anchor warned nobody”), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as the news anchor didn’t warn anybody about the floods, are prescriptively correct. Because acceptability is often equated with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in “Standard” or standardized English (SE). However, it is possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors. To explore this question, and the relationship between NC and NPI constructions, we compared the acceptability of overtly negative noun phrases (e.g., nobody), NPIs (e.g., anybody), and bare plurals (e.g., people), in negative contexts and in conditionals. Negative items were followed by a consequence which supported their single negative meaning, while conditional items were followed by a consequence compatible with the NPI and the bare plural but not the negative noun phrase. Acceptability ratings of the critical NC sentences were reliably lower than constructions with NPIs and bare plurals, but the consequences for all three of these sentence types were rated highly. This reflects an asymmetry in participants’ acceptance of NC and their readiness to interpret it in context. A follow-up study with only conditionals revealed that speakers can also find NPIs infelicitous in conditional contexts with consequences that are compatible with a negative interpretation of the NPI, and that negative arguments are felicitous in these same contexts. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that speakers who do not accept NC have grammars that generate both NC and NPI constructions, and further, that these speakers have two underlying structures for any-NPIs in English.

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“…(15) More committed <LEIDER p, UNGLÜCKLICHERWEISE p> Less committed Third, Liu (2019) shows experimental evidence that in German and English conditionals, NPIs (jemals/überhaupt 'ever/at all') led to lower ratings of speaker commitment to the antecedent proposition in comparison to sentences without NPIs. This finding can be put into the SCS in (16).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…This contrast speaks in favor of the non-atissue status or pragmatic nature of the bias encoded in falls. (Simons et al, 2010;Liu, 2012 Liu (2019): The relative clause in the sentence indicates the speaker's commitment to the antecedent proposition, which does not go along with the CC im unwahrscheinlichen Fall, dass but is ok with falls. This indicates that in the former case, the unlikelihood meaning component is semantic/conventional and thus uncancellable, whereas it is pragmatic/conversational and thus cancellable in the latter case.…”

Section: Liu and Wang (mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The effect of adding durchaus 'quite' weakens the speaker commitment, bearing a similar effect as wahrscheinlich 'likely'. The addition of eigentlich 'actually' signals that there is a contextual expectation (e.g., of the shops being open) set by the antecedent which the speaker rejects with the use of the RC (see Bergena and Boskerb, 2018 As to falls, it has been noted that the negative bias generated by it is not always cancellable, as can be seen in ( 39) from Liu (2019), attributed to an reviewer. Hause.…”

Section: Less Committedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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The elastic nonveridicality property of indicative conditionals

Cited by 13 publications

References 15 publications

Novel ERP Evidence for Processing Differences Between Negative and Positive Polarity Items in German

Novel ERP Evidence for Processing Differences Between Negative and Positive Polarity Items in German

Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap

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

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