Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German
Open Access
- 10 August 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
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) towards 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 committedFunding Information
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
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