Abstract
In pragmatic literature, it is very well known that many conditional utterances invite conditional perfection as a non-monotonic inference or conversational implicature. In this paper, we argue that three types of conditional perfection have to be distinguished: two specific ones ( only if p, q and only if not p, not q), and a more general one ( if not p, then not q). In addition, we stipulate that these three types of conditional perfection correlate with different speech act types, and we explain this correlation in terms of the semantics and the pragmatics of the conditionals in question. Our analysis provides a valuable contribution to some controversies in current pragmatics, namely regarding the defeasibility of implicatures and the notion of conditional speech act.
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