This paper presents and explains the functions of pragmatic conditionals in standard Macedonian. They constitute a versatile group with central and peripheral members united by semantic and pragmatic properties that set them apart from... more
This paper presents and explains the functions of pragmatic conditionals in standard Macedonian. They constitute a versatile group with central and peripheral members united by semantic and pragmatic properties that set them apart from hypothetical conditionals. We distinguish three types: pseudoconditional, relevant and rhetoric pragmatic conditionals. The central class of pseudoconditionals does not have any links to the hypothetical conditionals, while the two are indirectly connected to them. In the closed class of pseudoconditionals, the if-clause was conventionalized into a phrase that modifies the speech act coded in the simple sentence. These if-modifiers do not contain reference to the propositional content of the speech act but have various communicative roles. Stemming from speaker’s wish to follow the cooperative principle in conversation they typically serve as hedges of the propositional content or the illocutionary force of the utterance. The other two classes are defined as peripheral because their protases state a condition. The first class of indirect pragmatic conditionals is inferentially related to the hypothetical conditionals because the if-clause provides a relevant condition for the realization of the speech act expressed in the main clause. The second class is represented by rhetoric conditionals which are used as argumentative strategies in discourse.
The main objective of this paper is to elucidate how the protasis of speech act conditionals can be understood either as the explicitation of one of Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims or as one of Searle’s (1969) felicity conditions.... more
The main objective of this paper is to elucidate how the protasis of speech act conditionals can be understood either as the explicitation of one of Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims or as one of Searle’s (1969) felicity conditions. Due to the theoretical framework that I have decided to use, I call these conditionals speech act conditionals, but these same sentences can be called pseudo-conditionals (Pinkster 1990) or illocutionary conditionals (Martín, 2009; Wakker, 1994), etc.
It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered,... more
It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed in the contrapositive without them. A distinction is made between adding new meaning and adding new words to preserve existing meaning. For concessive conditionals and relevance conditionals, however, no valid contrapositive can be found. They do not belong to the class of contraposable conditionals, which can be independently defined. Difficult cases are also discussed in which the contradictory of the consequent semantically entails the truth of the antecedent. In such cases the content of the antecedent is implicit in the meaning of the consequent. Contraposition becomes possible if what is implicit in the original consequent is made explicit in the contrapositive antecedent.
