Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought

Giannakidou, Anastasia; Mari, Alda

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226763484.001.0001

Cited by 40 publications

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“…In the analysis, I will use two theoretical components: One is the speaker commitment scales used in Giannakidou and Mari (2016 , 2021) . Following their works, I assume “non-veridical equilibrium” (implying that p and ¬p as equal possibilities) to be the default for epistemic possibility, questions, and conditionals.…”

Section: Non-at-issue Meanings Of Wenn/falls In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Falls is degraded in counterfactual optatives and arguably in counterfactual conditionals (Contrast 3 and 2) due to the counterfactual presupposition or implicature (i.e., speaker’s anti-commitment to the antecedent proposition). This contradicts the meaning of falls , which presupposes the absence of bias to start with, i.e., the non-veridicality of the antecedent proposition (dubbed as the “Non-veridicality Equilibrium,” the default of epistemic possibility, in Giannakidou and Mari, 2021 ), and implicates the WUI. The reason why falls is acceptable in counterfactual conditionals for some speakers might be because the negative bias of falls is a conversational implicature (which is lexically triggered but needs contextual support) and thus cancellable or optional ( Grice, 1989 ; Zakkou, 2018 ), or in general, there might be individual differences in the (quality of the) lexical representations of wenn/falls.…”

Section: Non-at-issue Meanings Of Wenn/falls In Germanmentioning

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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Section: Non-at-issue Meanings Of Wenn/falls In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Non-at-issue Meanings Of Wenn/falls In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Liu

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Nonveridical equilibrium says that p and ¬p (i.e., not p ) are equal possibilities, none is privileged over the other (Giannakidou, 2013 ; Giannakidou & Mari, 2018a , b , 2021a , b ). The speaker has no preference for a positive or negative answer, no prior beliefs, knowledge, or expectations that would make them think that Agnes is or is not a vegetarian.…”

Section: Introduction: Equilibrium and Bias In Questions And Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What is called ‘bias’ is the destruction of equilibrium in a positive or negative direction. If the speaker adds certain devices, such as high negation (2a), a negative tag (2b), or the adverb really (2c), the questions are now said to favor a particular (positive or negative) answer (Sadock, 1971 ; Ladd, 1981 ; Abels, 2003 ; van Rooy & Šafárová 2003 ; Romero & Han, 2004 ; Reese, 2006 ; Reese & Asher, 2006 ; Krifka, 2015 ; Malamud & Stephenson, 2015 ; Farkas & Roelofsen, 2017 ; AnderBois, 2019 ; Mari & Tahar, 2019 ; Giannakidou & Mari, 2021a , b ; Bill & Koev, 2021 ). In (2a,b) the speaker has a positive bias: the speaker seems to believe that Agnes is a vegetarian, and asks the question with the intention for their belief to be confirmed by the hearer.…”

Section: Introduction: Equilibrium and Bias In Questions And Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the case of positive bias, the speaker seems to be more committed to p , and in the negative bias less committed to p . Speaker commitment 2 is a notion we borrow from the modality vocabulary of Giannakidou and Mari ( 2018a , b , 2021a , b )’s veridicality theory that we discuss in Sect. 2 , and is a handy way to talk about the speaker’s attitude towards the veridicality of a sentence.…”

Section: Introduction: Equilibrium and Bias In Questions And Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bias and Modality in Conditionals: Experimental Evidence and Theoretical Implications

Liu

Rotter

Giannakidou

2021

J Psycholinguist Res

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The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume “nonveridical equilibrium” (implying that p and ¬p as equal possibilities) to be the default for epistemic modals, questions and conditionals. The equilibrium of conditionals, as that of questions, can be manipulated to produce bias (i.e., reduced or higher speaker commitment). In this paper, we focus on three kinds of modal elements in German that create bias in conditionals and questions: the adverb wirklich ‘really’, the modal verb sollte ‘should’, and conditional connectives such as falls ‘if/in case’. We conducted two experiments collecting participants’ inference about speaker commitment in different manipulations, Experiment 1 on sollte/wirklich in ob-questions and wenn-conditionals, and Experiment 2 on sollte/wirklich in wenn/falls/V1-conditionals. Our findings are that both ob-questions and falls-conditionals express reduced speaker commitment about the modified (antecedent) proposition in comparison to wenn-conditionals, which did not differ from V1-conditionals. In addition, sollte/wirklich in the antecedent of conditionals both create negative bias about the antecedent proposition. Our studies are among the first that deal with bias in conditionals (in comparison to questions) and contribute to furthering our understanding of bias.

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Baunaz

Puskás²

2022

Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory

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Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought

Cited by 40 publications

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

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

Bias and Modality in Conditionals: Experimental Evidence and Theoretical Implications

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