Elder, Chi-He ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3702-5397 and Jaszczolt, Kasia M
(2016)
Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals.
Journal of Pragmatics, 98.
pp. 36-53.
ISSN 0378-2166
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Abstract
In this paper, we present the benefits of regarding conditionality as a pragmatic phenomenon as compared with approaches based on the syntactic category of a conditional sentence. We propose a pragmatic category of conditionality and justify it using theoretical arguments supported with examples from our database collected from the International Corpus of English-GB. Next, we demonstrate how conditional utterances that pertain to a variety of syntactic constructions can be represented in Default Semantics, a contextualist, truth-conditional approach to utterance meaning. We identify six types of such constructions, using the dimensions of (i) primary vs. secondary meaning (PM/SM index) and (ii) meaning conveyed through sentence structure vs. meaning conveyed at the level of merger representation (WS/Σ index). It is concluded that in view of the diversity of constructions through which conditional thoughts are expressed, conditionality is best regarded as a pragmatic (and as such conceptual) category. Finally, we comment on the status of this claim as a potential semantic/pragmatic universal.
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | conditionals,pragmatic category,radical contextualism,default semantics,language and linguistics,linguistics and language ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1203 |
Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies |
UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Area Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Language and Communication Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > UEA Experimental Philosophy Group |
Depositing User: | Pure Connector |
Date Deposited: | 10 May 2016 12:00 |
Last Modified: | 21 Jul 2023 09:41 |
URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58624 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.pragma.2016.04.013 |
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