Unless, exceptives, and the pragmatics of conditionals
Prerna Nadathur, Daniel Lassiter
March 2019
 

The connective unless has resisted a compositional semantic analysis, appearing to contribute a biconditional meaning when composed with the positive universal quantifier 'every', but a one-directional meaning when composed with 'no'. We report on two experimental investigations comparing the meaning and interpretation of quantified 'unless'- and 'if not'-conditionals, the results of which argue against the received ‘exceptive’ treatments of unless (von Fintel 1993, 1994, Leslie 2009). The first experiment, using the quantifiers 'every' and 'no', demonstrates that 'unless' is not semantically biconditional, and suggests that it is instead sensitive to a prohibition against use in contexts where the conditional consequent holds across the board. The second experiment, using the quantifiers 'most', 'some', and 'few', demonstrates contra previous authors that 'unless' composes meaningfully with non-universal quantifiers, and clarifies the interpretation of some puzzling results of Experiment 1. Building on these results, we propose a new account of 'unless' on which it shares the asserted content of 'if not'. Both kinds of conditionals are associated with an inference that the speaker has a reason for avoiding the use of the simpler, unconditional proposition q, but this inference is conventionally encoded as a presupposition in the case of 'unless'. We argue that the stronger tendency of 'unless' toward a biconditional interpretation is due to the interaction of its presuppositional content with a conditional perfection implicature that applies to both kinds of conditionals. We explore the consequences of this difference for the pragmatic behaviour of conditional statements, and suggest some directions for further investigation of quantified statements, conditionals, and exceptive constructions.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006418
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:
keywords: unless, if not, conditionals, conditional perfection, conditional strengthening, implicature, presupposition, truth-value judgement task, experimental pragmatics, exceptive constructions, semantics
Downloaded:311 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]