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Towards a semantics for biscuit conditionals

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Abstract

This essay proposes a semantic analysis of biscuit-conditionals, such as Austin’s classic example “there are biscuits in the cupboard if you want some”. The analysis is grounded on the ideas of contextual restrictions, and of non-character encoded aspects of meaning, and provides a rigorous framework for the widespread intuitions that (i) the if-clause in a biscuit-conditional is truth-conditionally idle, but (ii) it ‘qualifies’ the speech-act in question. In the concluding section of this essay, the analysis is also applied to the importantly similar phenomenon of speech-act adverbs.

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Notes

  1. More precisely, a character is a function from contexts to intensions, that is, to functions that select a semantic value with respect to a point of evaluation. Since simple indexicals such as ‘I’ are associated with a constant intension, this complication may be ignored in what follows.

  2. For brevity’s sake, I speak of the character of a complex expression merely to indicate its truth-conditional contribution on the basis of the characters of the simple expressions in contains, and of its syntactic structure. For comments on the use of characters for complex expressions, see King and Stanley (2005).

  3. The truth-conditional irrelevance of speech-act adverbs proved particularly intractable from the viewpoint of the so-called ‘performative analysis’ within generative semantics; see among many Lakoff (1972) and the discussion in Boer and Lycan (1980). The distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional uses of ‘frankly’ is expressed within the relevance theoretic framework in terms of the dichotomy between conceptual and procedural meaning; for discussion, see for instance Blakemore (1987), Wilson and Sperber (1993), Fraser (1996), Rieber (1997), and Bach (1999).

  4. So, for instance, ‘frankly, shut up!’ qualifies the order to shut up as being forthright. Cases with requests for information may need to be handled with care. So, although ‘frankly, is he still lying?’ may be intended to convey that the speaker’s request is forthright, it may also be understood as a request for a frank answer.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Stefano Predelli

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  1. Stefano Predelli
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Correspondence to Stefano Predelli.

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Predelli, S. Towards a semantics for biscuit conditionals. Philos Stud 142, 293–305 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9187-8

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