Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German
Mingya Liu · Frontiers in Psychology · 2021
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 thatwennandfallsdiffer in lexical pragmatics: They express different degrees of speaker commitment (i.e., credence) toward 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 committed Less committed. Four experiments are reported which tested thewenn/fallscontrast, as well as the summary of an additional one from Liu (2019) . Experiment 1 tested the naturalness of sentences containing the CCs (wennorfalls) and conditional antecedents with varying degrees of likelihood (very likely/likely/unlikely). The starting prediction was thatfallsmight be degraded in combination with very likely and likely events in comparison to the other conditions, which was not borne out. Experiment 2 used the forced lexical choice paradigm, testing the choice betweenwennandfallsin the doxastic agent’s conditional thought, depending on their belief or disbelief in the antecedent. The finding was that subjects chosefallssignificantly more often thanwennin the disbelief-context, and vice versa in the belief-context. Experiment 3 tested the naturalness of sentences with CCs and an additional relative clause conveying the speaker’s belief or disbelief in the antecedent. An interaction was found: While in the belief-context,wennwas rated more natural thanfalls, the reverse pattern was found in the disbelief-context. While the results are mixed, the combination of the findings in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 and that of Experiment 4a from Liu (2019) thatfallsled to lower speaker commitment ratings thanwenn, provide evidence for the CC scale. Experiment 4b tested the interaction between two speaker commitment scales, namely, one of connectives (includingweil‘because’ andwenn/falls) and the other of adverbs (factive vs. non-factive, Liu, 2012 ). While factive and non-factive adverbs were rated equally natural for the factive causal connective, non-factive adverbs were preferred over factive ones by both CCs, with no difference betweenwennandfalls. This is discussed together with the result in Liu (2019) , where thewenn/fallsdifference occurred in the absence of negative polarity items (NPIs), but disappeared in the presence of NPIs. This raises further questions on how different speaker commitment scales interact and why.