Promises and Threats with Conditionals and Disjunctions

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2012
Host editors
  • G. Grewendorf
  • T.E. Zimmermann
Book title Discourse and grammar: from sentence types to lexical categories
ISBN
  • 9781614512158
Series Studies in generative grammar, 112
Pages (from-to) 69-88
Publisher Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI)
Abstract With a conditional "If you do . . . , I’ll do . . . " we can make promises and threats. But with a disjunction "You do . . . , or I’ll do . . . " we can only make threats, no promises. We suggest that this so because disjunctive promises would be a suboptimal strategic commitment in a game-like situation where the speaker is trying to influence the hearer’s choice of action.
Document type Chapter
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511601.69
Downloads
joint_PIs2010 (Submitted manuscript)
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