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The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy

  • Agnès Celle EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: January 22, 2024
Folia Linguistica
From the journal Folia Linguistica Volume 59 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper accounts for the epistemic use of the conditional in polar questions in French. It is argued that polar questions modalised by the epistemic conditional are biased questions that serve an argumentative function, and that the conditional contributes a different commitment update in interrogatives and in questioning declaratives. The bias type depends on whether the question is interrogative or declarative. In interrogatives, the epistemic conditional is generally associated with the subject clitic-verb inversion pattern. This pattern is argued to routinely convey evidential bias, while evidential bias is determined by the context in est-ce que questions. As biased polar questions in the conditional do not undergo interrogative flip, the conjectural meaning conveyed by the combination of the conditional and questioning is reported to be an evidential extension in keeping with evidentiality in non-flip languages (Bhadra, Diti. 2020. The semantics of evidentials in questions. Journal of Semantics 37. 367–423). This might shed new light on the apparent conceptual puzzle posed by the shift in meaning of the epistemic conditional in assertions and in questions.

Keywords: conditional; questions; evidentiality; epistemicity; conjecture; bias
Corresponding author: Agnès Celle, Université Paris Cité, CLILLAC-ARP, Paris, France, E-mail:
This work was supported by the Prestige Marie Curie Grant n°2017-3-0004. Earlier versions of this paper benefited from the generous feedback of various audiences – LACUS 2018 in Waterloo, ICEM 2018 in Madrid, LingLunch at Université Paris Cité and the workshop on the Pragmatics of Evidentiality at the University of Ca’Foscari in Venice in 2021.

Funding source: Prestige Marie Curie Grant

Award Identifier / Grant number: 2017-3-0004

  1. Research funding: This work was supported by the Prestige Marie Curie Grant (2017-3-0004).

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Received: 2022-05-31
Accepted: 2023-07-31
Published Online: 2024-01-22
Published in Print: 2025-04-28

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. The pragmatics of evidentiality: markers, strategies and implications for linguistic theory
  4. Articles
  5. Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
  6. The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy
  7. Evidentials and dubitatives in Finnish: perspective shift in questions and embedded contexts
  8. Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical
  9. Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond
  10. Some notes on the role of modal particles in weil+V2-clauses in German
  11. The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information
  12. The interrogative flip with illocutionary evidentials
  13. Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian
https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2023-2052
Keywords for this article
conditional; questions; evidentiality; epistemicity; conjecture; bias

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. The pragmatics of evidentiality: markers, strategies and implications for linguistic theory
  4. Articles
  5. Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
  6. The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy
  7. Evidentials and dubitatives in Finnish: perspective shift in questions and embedded contexts
  8. Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical
  9. Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond
  10. Some notes on the role of modal particles in weil+V2-clauses in German
  11. The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information
  12. The interrogative flip with illocutionary evidentials
  13. Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian
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