Schwab Juliane, Liu Mingya
Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany.
Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jun 10;13:894396. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.894396. eCollection 2022.
Both indicative and counterfactual conditionals are known to be licensing contexts for negative polarity items (NPIs). However, a recent theoretical account suggests that the licensing of attenuating NPIs like English in the conditional antecedent is sensitive to pragmatic differences between various types of conditionals. We conducted three behavioral experiments in order to test key predictions made by that proposal. In Experiment 1, we tested hypothetical indicative and counterfactual conditionals with the English NPI , finding that the NPI is degraded in the former compared to the latter. In Experiment 2, we compared hypothetical indicative conditionals and premise conditionals with the same NPI, again finding a degradation only for the former. Both results align with theoretically derived predictions purporting that hypothetical indicative conditionals are degraded due to their susceptibility to conditional perfection. Finally, Experiment 3 provides empirical evidence that comprehenders readily strengthen counterfactual conditionals to biconditionals, in line with theoretical analyses that assume that conditional perfection and counterfactual inferences are compatible. Their ability to still host attenuating NPIs in the conditional antecedent, by contrast, falls into place the antiveridical inference to the falsity of the antecedent. Altogether, our study sheds light on the interplay between NPI licensing and the semantic and pragmatic properties of various types of conditionals. Moreover, it provides a novel perspective on the processing of different kinds of conditionals in context, in particular, with regard to their (non)veridicality properties.
已知指示性条件句和反事实条件句都是负极性项（NPIs）的允准语境。然而，最近的一种理论解释表明，像英语中的 这样的弱化负极性项在条件句前件中的允准对不同类型条件句之间的语用差异很敏感。我们进行了三项行为实验，以检验该提议所做出的关键预测。在实验1中，我们用英语负极性项测试了假设性指示性条件句和反事实条件句，发现与后者相比，前者中的负极性项有所退化。在实验2中，我们用相同的负极性项比较了假设性指示性条件句和前提条件句，同样发现只有前者出现了退化。这两个结果都与理论推导的预测一致，即假设性指示性条件句因其易受条件完善的影响而退化。最后，实验3提供了实证证据，表明理解者很容易将反事实条件句强化为双向条件句，这与假设条件完善和反事实推理兼容的理论分析一致。相比之下，它们在条件句前件中仍能容纳弱化负极性项的能力，与对前件为假的反事实推理相契合。总之，我们的研究揭示了负极性项允准与各类条件句的语义和语用属性之间的相互作用。此外，它为在语境中处理不同类型条件句，特别是关于它们的（非）真实性属性，提供了一个新的视角。
