Metalinguistic conditionals and the role of explicit content

Abstract

AbstractThis paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguisticif you likeas a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguisticif you likeis polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker’s reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due to the ‘ifp,q’ sentence form. That is, although the metalinguistic reading is most likely obtained automatically by default, it also carries an available conditional reading that is akin to other metalinguistic conditional clauses such asif you see what I mean. Next, a semantic representation of metalinguisticif you likeis developed that takes on board a characterization of conditionality that departs from lexico-grammatical conventions, such that conditionals of the form ‘ifp,q’ no longer bear a one-to-one correspondence with “conditional” truth conditions. Employing a radical contextualist semantic framework in which the unit of truth-conditional analysis is not constrained to the sentence form, utterances employing metalinguisticif you likeare given a semantic representation such that theif-clause does not contribute propositional content, yet they also maintain their status as conditionals as the sentence form gives rise to a potential conditional secondary meaning.