Speaker Commitment in Mandarin Conditional Connectives: Distributional and Experimental Evidence

Abstract

AbstractThe interpretation of conditionals is a long but ongoing debate in linguistics (cf. von Fintel 2007, 2011, 2012). In this paper, we focus on the meaning contribution of conditional connectives (CCs). According to Kratzer (1986, 1991), the English CC if has no semantics on its own and if-clauses are used to restrict modal or generic frequency operators. The restrictor analysis of conditionals and CCs has inspired many insightful follow-up studies through which it becomes clear that the interpretation of conditional sentences is subject to a process of semantic and pragmatic modulation. However, the role of CCs in the modulation process remains far from clear in the current literature, although CCs can influence the interpretation of conditional sentences in various ways. In this paper, we will argue with distributional observations and experimental evidence that Mandarin CCs can express different degrees of speaker commitment (Giannakidou and Mari 2015) towards the antecedent proposition, as non-at-issue meaning.KeywordsMandarinConditional connective Wanyi Speaker commitmentExperiment