Counterfactual biscuit conditionals: A temporal remoteness Approach

Hypothetical conditionals like If you are hungry, your stomach is growling and ‘biscuit’ conditionals like If you are hungry, there is pizza in the fridge have been analysed as sharing the same syntactic and semantic template, differing only in the presence of an additional pragmatic inference leading to the ‘biscuit’ effect in the latter case (Franke 2009: a.o.). However, when considering their counterfactual versions, the two forms differ in the verbal morphological make-up of the consequent clause, which posits a challenge to the unified approach. The present papers develops an analysis of tense and mood morphology within the unified approach where the key idea is that counterfactuals biscuits involve breaking Sequence of Tense and so-called Sequence of Mood. Unacceptable biscuit and hypothetical forms are ruled out via pragmatic competition between weaker and stronger forms and via the Gricean Principle of Manner.

Adverbial clauses and V3

This paper discusses word order effects in German adverbial clauses: often, the matrix clause can exhibit either V2 or V3 word order. I argue that adverbial clauses with V3 word order have an obligatory ‘biscuit’ interpretation and receive a speech act modifying interpretation, as has previously only been argued for ‘biscuit conditionals’. I show that this phenomenon holds more generally. On the other hand, a pragmatic analysis for V2 biscuit conditionals remains necessary.

Laws for biscuits: Independence and dependence in conditionals

Pragmatic theories of biscuit conditionals (BCs) claim that BCs have a standard conditional semantics and that the defining characteristics is a contextual assumption of independence. Intuitively there is no connection between antecedent and consequent. I argue that the standard formalization of independence is insuf- ficient. This is shown with the phenomenon of factual uses of conditionals where the antecedent is mutually accepted by discourse participants. The standard account is amended with a framework which represents dependencies between facts and ‘grounds’ the standard formalization in the independence of facts.