Bias and Modality in Conditionals: Experimental Evidence and Theoretical Implications.
Adverb
Bias
Conditional connective
Conditionals
Experiment
German
Modal verb
Questions
Journal
Journal of psycholinguistic research
ISSN: 1573-6555
Titre abrégé: J Psycholinguist Res
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 0333506
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Dec 2021
Dec 2021
Historique:
accepted:
21
07
2021
pubmed:
2
11
2021
medline:
15
12
2021
entrez:
1
11
2021
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume "nonveridical equilibrium" (implying that p and ¬p as equal possibilities) to be the default for epistemic modals, questions and conditionals. The equilibrium of conditionals, as that of questions, can be manipulated to produce bias (i.e., reduced or higher speaker commitment). In this paper, we focus on three kinds of modal elements in German that create bias in conditionals and questions: the adverb wirklich 'really', the modal verb sollte 'should', and conditional connectives such as falls 'if/in case'. We conducted two experiments collecting participants' inference about speaker commitment in different manipulations, Experiment 1 on sollte/wirklich in ob-questions and wenn-conditionals, and Experiment 2 on sollte/wirklich in wenn/falls/V1-conditionals. Our findings are that both ob-questions and falls-conditionals express reduced speaker commitment about the modified (antecedent) proposition in comparison to wenn-conditionals, which did not differ from V1-conditionals. In addition, sollte/wirklich in the antecedent of conditionals both create negative bias about the antecedent proposition. Our studies are among the first that deal with bias in conditionals (in comparison to questions) and contribute to furthering our understanding of bias.
Identifiants
pubmed: 34724149
doi: 10.1007/s10936-021-09813-z
pii: 10.1007/s10936-021-09813-z
pmc: PMC8660720
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
1369-1399Subventions
Organisme : Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
ID : 367088975
Informations de copyright
© 2021. The Author(s).
Références
Abels, K. 2003. Who gives a damn about minimizers in questions? In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 13: 1-18
Anand, P. and Brasoveanu, A. (2010). Modal concord as modal modification. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 14, 19–36
AnderBois, S. (2019). Negation, alternatives, and negative polar questions in American english. In K. von Heusinger, M. Zimmermann, & E. Onea (Eds.), Questions in Discourse—Volume 1: Semantics (pp. 118–171). Brill.
Arregui, A. C. (2005). On the accessibility of possible worlds: the role of tense and aspect. Doctoral Dissertation, UMass Amherst.
Arregui, A. & M. Biezma. (2016). Discourse rationality and the counterfactuality implicature in backtracking conditionals. In: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20. 91-108
Bates, D., Kliegl, R., Vasishth, S. and Baayen, H. (2015). Parsimonious Mixed Models. arXiv. 1506.
Beaver, D. & Frazee, J. (2016). Semantics. In The Handbook of Computational Linguistics. In R. Mitkov (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (2nd edition). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Bill, C. and Koev, T. (2021). Really: Ambiguity and question bias. Talk at Sinn und Bedeutung 26, University of Cologne (September 8-10, 2021). https://osf.io/t9my4/
Borkin, A. 1971. Polarity items in questions. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society 7, 53–62
Breindl, E., Volodina, A. and Waßner, U. (2014). Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren 2: Semantik der deutschen Satzverknüpfer (= Schriften des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache 13.1–13.2). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Büring, D. and Gunlogson, C. (2000). Aren't positive and negative polar questions the same? LSA Annual meeting.
Chatzopoulou, K. (2019). Negation and nonveridicality in the diachrony of Greek. Oxford University Press.
Chatzopoulou, K. (2021). The history of Greek conditionals and one modal cycle. Journal of Historical Syntax, 5(19), 1–47.
Christensen, R. H. B. (2019). Package ‘ordinal’. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordinal/ordinal.pdf (accessed: 31.05.2021)
Condoravdi, C. (2002). Temporal interpretation of modals: Modals for the present and for the past. In B. Z. Clark, S. Kaufmann, D. Beaver, & L. D. Cassillas Maritinez (Eds.), The construction of meaning. CSLI.
Domaneschi, F., Romero, M., & Braun, B. (2017). Bias in polar questions: Evidence from English and German production experiments. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2(1), 26.
Drummond, A. (2013). Ibex farm. URL: http:spellout.net/ibexfarm
Farkas, D. F. (1992). On the semantics of subjunctive complements. In P. Hirschbuhler & E. F. K. Koerner (Eds.), Romance languages and modern linguistic theory. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Farkas, D. F., & Roelofsen, F. (2017). Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and interrogatives. Journal of Semantics, 34, 237–289.
Geurts, B., & Huitink, J. (2006). Modal concord. In P. Dekker & H. Zeijlstra (Eds.), Concord and the syntax–semantics interface. ESSLLI.
Giannakidou, A. (1998). Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Giannakidou, A. (1999). Affective dependencies. Linguistics and Philosophy, 22, 367–421.
Giannakidou, A. (2007). The landscape of EVEN. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 25, 39–81.
Giannakidou, A. (2013). Inquisitive assertions and nonveridicality. In M. Aloni, M. Franke, & F. Roelofsen (Eds.), The dynamic, inquisitive, and visionary life of φ, ?φ and possibly φ, a feestschrift for Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof and Frank Veltman (pp. 115–126). University of Amsterdam.
Giannakidou, A., & Mari, A. (2018a). A unified analysis of the future as epistemic modality: The view from Greek and Italian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 36, 85–129.
Giannakidou, A., & Mari, A. (2018b). The semantic roots of positive polarity: Epistemic modal verbs and adverbs in English, Greek and Italian. Linguistics and Philosophy, 41, 623–664.
Giannakidou, A., & Mari, A. (2021a). Truth and veridicality in grammar and thought: Modality, mood, and propositional attitudes. University of Chicago Press.
Giannakidou, A., & Mari, A. (2021b). Modalization and bias in questions. University of Chicago and Insitut Jean Nicod.
Giannakidou, A., & Quer, J. (2013). Exhaustive and non-exhaustive variation with free choice and referential vagueness: Evidence from Greek, Catalan, and Spanish. Lingua, 126, 120–49.
Giannakidou, A. (1997). The Landscape of Polarity Items. Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen, Amsterdam.
Giannakidou, A. & Mari, A. (2016). Epistemic future and epistemic MUST: Nonveridicality, evidence, and partial knowledge. In J. Blaszczak, A. Giannakidou, D. Klimek-Jankowska, & K. Migdalski (Eds.), Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited: New Answers to Old Questions (75–124). University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Giannakidou, A. (2021). Manipulations of Nonveridical equilibrium in conditionals: a new perspective on bias. Invited Presentation at the 43th DGfS Meeting, University of Freiburg.
Grosz, P. G. (2012). On the grammar of optative constructions. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Grosz, P. (2010). Grading modality: A new approach to modal concord and its relatives. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 14, 185–201
Guerzoni, E. (2004). Even-NPIs in YES/NO questions. Natural Language Semantics, 12, 319–343.
Guerzoni, E., & Sharvit, Y. (2007). A question of strength: On NPIs in interrogative clauses. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30, 361–391.
Hacquard, V., & Wellwood, A. (2012). Embedding epistemic modals in English: A corpus-based study. Semantics and Pragmatics, 5(4), 1–29.
Hoeksema, J. (2012). On the natural history of negative polarity items. Linguistic Analysis, 38, 3–34.
Huitink, J. (2012). Modal concord. A case study in Dutch. Journal of Semantics, 29(3), 403–437.
Huitink, J. (2014). Modal concord. In L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullman, & T. E. Zimmermann (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to semantics. Wiley.
Iatridou, S. (1991). Topics in Conditionals. unpublished Ph.D. thesis, MIT.
Ionin, T. (2006). This is definitely specific: Specificity and definiteness in article systems. Natural Language Semantics, 14, 175–234.
Ippolito, M., & Su, J. (2014). Counterfactuals, negation and polarity. In L. Crnič & U. Sauerland (Eds.), The art and craft of semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim. MITWPL.
Jiang, Y. (2019). Ways for expressing counterfactual conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics Vanguard. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0009
doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2019-0009
Kaufmann, S. (2005). Conditional truth and future reference. Journal of Semantics, 22, 231–280.
Kratzer, A. (1977). What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Linguistics and Philosophy, 1, 337–355.
Kratzer, A. (1986). Conditionals. Chicago Linguistics Society, 22(2), 1–15.
Kratzer, A. (1991). Conditionals. In A. von Stechow & D. Wunderlich (Eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research (pp. 651–656). De Gruyter.
Krifka, M. (2015). Bias in commitment space semantics: Declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 25, 328–345.
Ladd, R. D. (1981). A First Look at the Semantics and Pragmatics of Negative Questions and Tag Questions. In Papers from the Seventeenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 164–171.
Liu, M. (2019). The elastic nonveridicality property of indicative conditionals. Linguistics Vanguard. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0007
doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2019-0007
Liu, M. (2012). Multidimensional Semantics of Evaluative Adverbs. Brill, Leiden/Boston.
Liu, M., & Wang Y. (2021). Speaker commitment in Mandarin conditional connectives: Distributional and experimental evidence. In: M. Liu, C. Kit, & Q. Su (Eds.) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 12278). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_67
Liu, M. (2021). Processing non-at-issue meanings of conditional connectives: The wenn/falls contrast in German. Frontiers Psychology, 12, 629177.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Malamud, S., & Stephenson, T. (2015). Three ways to avoid commitments: Declarative force modifiers in the conversational scoreboard. Journal of Semantics, 32(2), 275–311.
Mari, A. & Tahar, C. (2019). From prohibitive to expletive negation. In M. Franke, N. Kompa, M. Liu, J. Mueller & J. Schwab (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24(2), 56-71. Osnabrück University/Humboldt University of Berlin, Osnabrück/Berlin.
Northrup, O. (2014). Grounds for Commitment. Ph.D. Dissertation of the University of California Santa Cruz.
Portner, P., & Rubinstein, A. (2016). Extreme and non-extreme deontic modals. In N. Charlow & M. Chrisman (Eds.), Deontic modality. OUP.
Portner, P. (2009). Modality. Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford University Press.
R Core Team. (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R foundation for statistical computing. https://cran.r-project.org/
Reese, B. J. (2006). The meaning and use of negative polar interrogatives. In O. Bonami & P. C. Hofherr (Eds.), Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics 6 (Papers from CSSP 2005) (331–354).
Reese, B. J. and Asher, N. (2006). Prosody and the interpretation of tag questions, Talk presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 11.
Reis, M., & Wöllstein, A. (2010). Zur Grammatik (vor allem) konditionaler V1-Gefüge im Deutschen. Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft, 29, 111–179.
Rojas-Esponda, T. (2014). A dicourse model for überhaupt. Semantics and Pragmatics, 7(1), 1–45.
Romero, M., & Han, C. H. (2004). On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 27, 609–658.
Sadock, J. M. (1971). Queclaratives. Proceedings of the 7th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, CLS, Chicago.
Simons, M., Beaver, D., Tonhauer, J., & Roberts, C. (2010). What projects and why. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 20, 309–327.
Sode, F. and Sugawara, A. (2019). On the Deliberative Use of the German Modal sollte. In Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., and Satoh, K. (Eds.) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018, LNCS 11717, 341–356. Springer.
Sudo, Y. (2013). Biased polar questions in English and Japanese. In D. Gutzmann & H.-M. Ga Gärtner (Eds.), Beyond expressives. Brill.
van Rooy, R. (2003). Negative polarity items in questions: Strength as relevance. Journal of Semantics, 20, 239–273.
Visconti, J. (1996). On English and Italian complex conditional connectives: Matching features and implicatures in defining semanto-pragmatic equivalence. Language Sciences, 18(1), 549–573.
von Fintel, K. (1999). NPI Licensing, Strawson Entailment, and Context dependency. Journal of Semantics, 16(2), 97–148.
von Fintel, K. (2001). Conditional strengthening: a case study in implicature. Manuscript, MIT.
von Fintel, K. (2007). If: The biggest little word. URL http://mit.edu/fintel/gurt-slides.pdf .
von Fintel, K. (2008). What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philosophical Perspectives, 22(1), 137–170.
von Fintel, K. (2011). Conditionals. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger, & P. Portner (Eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language and meaning. de Gruyter.
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2010). Must...stay... strong! Natural Language Semantics, 18, 351–383.
Yalçın, S. (2007). Epistemic modals. Mind, 116, 983–1026.
Zeijlstra, H. (2007). Modal Concord. In T. Friedman and M. Gibson (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 17, 317–332. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
Zifonun, G., Hoffmann, L., Strecker, B. and Ballweg, J. (1997). Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. 3 Bde. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
van Rooy, R. and M. Šafárová (2003). On Polar Questions. In R. Young and Y. Zhou (Eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 13, CLC Publications, Ithaca, NY.