CONDITIONALS ARE DISCOURSE-BOUND

Abstract

Editors' note . Akatsuka argues against a truth-conditional perspective in favour of a linguistic, specifically a pragmatic, approach. Using Japanese, English and some German data, she shows that we must consider discourse context as well as the speaker's attitude and prior knowledge to account for the semantics of conditionals. Conditionals in context are also the focus of Ford and Thompson's chapter; attitudes and beliefs are discussed by Adams, Barwise, and Fillenbaum. Akatsuka also suggests a ‘core’ meaning for conditionals that may or may not be morphologically defined, providing a link to the various discussions of marking, and of the relation of conditionals to causals, concessives, and to temporals and other domains. INTRODUCTION What I want to show in this chapter is that conditionals do not belong to the static domain of mathematical logic, but to the dynamic domain of discourse where individuals with different belief systems confront each other now . I will demonstrate that we must consider discourse factors in (i) the preceding context and (ii) the speaker's attitude; and also that there is a connection between p and q , that is, every construction with the meaning ‘if p, q ’ shares an abstract, grammatical meaning similar to ‘correlation/correspondence between p and q ’. The evidence will be developed as follows: section 2 will examine two types of English conditionals, both of which have generally been regarded as counterexamples to the ‘connection’ theory; section 3 will show that consideration of factors in (i) and (ii) leads us to distinguish information and knowledge; section 4 will show that this distinction leads us to reject Haiman's (1978) view that conditionals are givens; section 5 is a conclusion.

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