Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Semantics circle: Conditional perfection: from theories, experiments to cross-linguistic perspectives

Speaker Mingya Liu
Affiliaton(s) Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Date 14.02.2025, 14:00 - 15:30 Uhr
Time 14:00 o'clock
Venue ZAS Pariser Str. 1, 10719 Berlin; Room: 0.32 (Ground floor)

Abstract

Conditional perfection (CoP) refers to the phenomenon where a bare conditional sentence (if p, q) receives a biconditional (iff p, q) interpretation. In this talk, I will first review the current state of the art on the topic. Then, I will present a comparative case study with two goals: (i) to probe into possible grammatical factors (dis)favoring a CoP-interpretation of a given conditional if p, q; (ii) to shed some light on the crosslinguistic picture, checking whether the same grammatical manipulations are equally (ir)relevant for a conditional’s CoP-interpretation across two typologically unrelated groups of languages: Chinese on the one hand and English/German on the other. The main finding is that some, but not all grammatical manipulations share the same pragmatic effect in the two groups under consideration.

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