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Keywords:

Social Sciences, Linguistics, Language & Linguistics, Conditionals, Inferential, Meta-inferential, Clause integration, Meta-linguistic, Argumentation, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, 2004 Linguistics, 2203 Philosophy, Languages & Linguistics, 4704 Linguistics, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology

Abstract:

Inferential conditional sentences represent a blueprint of someone's reasoning process from premise to conclusion. The central aim of this paper is to argue for a distinction between inferential conditional clauses (CCs) and a new category of meta-inferential CCs, related to the meta-linguistic and meta-metaphorical CCs in Dancygier and Sweetser (2005). With the inferential CCs, an inferential speech act is encoded: a conclusion is being drawn on the basis of evidence in the antecedent. E.g. If the lights are on, they are home. The meta-inferential CCs, by contrast, comment upon that inferential process on a meta-level, and hence represent an assertive rather than an inferential speech act. E.g. If I see that the lights are on, I conclude that they are home. We first chart the different lexicalisation strategies for the concept of inference. The inventory distinguishes between the lexical marking of the inferential status of the CCs, only occurring in the consequent, and that of their meta-inferential status, surfacing in antecedent and/or consequent. We furthermore investigate the degree of clause integration for the different types of inferential and meta-inferential CCs in order to underpin and refine the semantic-pragmatic typology by means of formal syntactic criteria, such as proportionality and clefting. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.