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Abstract:

This study investigates the types of conditionals adults and children come up with when they are given the antecedent of a conditional and have to complete the consequent. Conditionals can be interpreted in different domains: the content, the epistemic, and the speech act domain (Dancygier, 1998; Sweetser, 1990). The experiment showed that children give many more conditionals that are a direct reflection of the course of events as they happen in reality (content conditionals). Adults express more variety. In many cases they also complete the conditionals to content conditionals, but their completions comprise nearly twice as many epistemic consequents. Moreover, the number of completions to epistemic conditionals can be manipulated along all age groups by suggesting particular lexical markers that have to be used in the consequent of the conditional. We will discuss these findings in the light of the linguistic skills required to understand relations in the content and the epistemic domain.