Context, Cognition and Conditionals

Reviews / Votes

"This book offers a bold new proposal on how to analyse conditionals in language, relating them to both human cognition and communication contexts rather than studying them at a sentence level, which has hitherto been the case in the literature. Based on extensive research by the author, it is a welcome and much needed contribution to both linguistics and philosophy of language. It is empirically strong, rich with examples and insightful theoretical analyses. Overall, it is an impressive example of integrative interdisciplinary research that marries various linguistic and philosophical traditions with regard to the study of meaning, providing a multifaceted treatment of meaning as a dynamic concept: one that comprises not just speaker intentions and hearer inferences, but also the aspects of joint work of interlocutors who create meanings together in specific conversations." (Luna Filipovic, Professor of Language and Cognition, University of East Anglia, UK)

"Chi-Hé Elder's pragmatic and cognitively-oriented account of conditionals develops an important new perspective on long-standing debates in linguistics. Her move to ensure such theoretical debates accord with empirical reality and situate the representation of meanings at the level of thought has far-reaching implications for how we might more productively work at the intersection of semantics and pragmatics. Readers will be rewarded with an exemplar par excellence of an empirically-grounded approach to theorisation in linguistics." (Michael Haugh, University of Queensland, Australia)

"Conditionals used to be easy. It was just a matter of IF and THEN. Nowadays it's a zoo. IFs without a consequent, IFs that don't provide a condition for the THEN, and all manner of WHENs and whatnots, or even conditionals with no connective at all. You want a conditional? There's one right here. Chi-Hé Elder's Context, Cognition and Conditionals presents a new and detailed study of naturally occurring corpus data, unique in coverage and unmatched in systematicity, and a new account which focuses not on conditional sentences, but on conditional thoughts. The corpus study alone, with its detailed taxonomy of conditional types and both qualitative and quantitative results, would be essential reading for anyone working on conditionals in the future. But Elder goes much further: using the framework of Default Semantics, she shows how we weave different elements of conventional meaning and contextual information together, revealing the ways in which conditional and non-conditional sentences alike may or may not express conditional thoughts. You want a great book on conditionals? Here it is!" (David Beaver, University of Texas at Austin, USA)