LINGUIST List 6.1377

Sun Oct 8 1995

Sum: Strange if-clauses

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. Larry Rosenwald, strange if-clauses: a summary

	Hi - a while back I posted a query about sentences like "if I don't
see you before you go, have a nice trip," where the wish expressed in the
second part of the sentence isn't in fact restricted by the the condition
stated in the first. I got lots of interesting responses; I'd like to
thank Jane Edwards, Ingo Plag, Lynne Hewitt, Alexis Manaster Ramer, Edith
Schouten (who sent an especially abundant listing of citations), F.K.
Lehman (whose message to me concluded with, "if this posting gets through
to you in ungarbled form, I hope it makes sense to you, but if it doesn't,
I hope you continue forever to misunderstand the issue"), Larry Horn, and
Clare Gallaway.
	The responses included a lot of bibliographical citations, which
I'll reproduce here as best I can (errors in this list are my fault alone):
	Eve Sweetser, _From Etymology to Pragmatics_ (Cambridge University
Press, 1990; Cambridges Studies in Lnguistics 54; this discusses sentences
like "if you're hungry, there's a good Chinese restaurant around the corner
);
	Brown and Levinson's Politeness in Conversation, either in E.
Goody ed., Questions and Politeness or as a stand-alone volume;
	R. A. Close, "'Will in If-Clauses," in Greenbaum et al., Studies in
English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk";
	L. Haegeman, "Pragmatic Conditionals in English," Folia Linguistica
18;
	H.D. Streatfeild, Notes on the Construciton of the Conditional in
English, in English Language Teaching 2;
	Celce-Murica & Larssen-Freeman, The Grammar Book (chapter 25);
	Tregigdgo, "Tense Patterns in Conditional Sentences," in English
Langauge Teaching Journal 34;
	N. Akatsuka, "Conditionals are Discourse-Bound," in Traugott et al.
, _On Conditionals_;
	P. Nieuwint, On Conditionals, thesis, Katholieke Universiteit
Brabant, Tilburg
	J. L Austin, "Ifs and Cans," in his Philosophical Papers;
	Alice Davison in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (1975);
	a 1970 paper by Bill Rutherford in _Language_;
	Jerry Sadock's _Towards a Linguistic Theory of . . ._, 1974
	
	The commentary is a little harder to summarize than is the
bibliography. There's consensus that, in Ingo Plag's formulation, "speech
act modifying sub-clauses do not really modify the main clause, as they
standardly do, but refer to the speech act in which they are uttered." But
there's also some messy stuff. Alexis Manaster Ramer argues that "such
things cannbet simply be remnants of a higher performative clauses because
they are subject to all kinds of special constraints." Clare Gallaway
notes that "clearly if devising a formal representation for something along
those lines, it would also be necessary to write in some rule about the
appropriiacy conditions for reading a sentence this way rather than any
other way." And Lynne Hewit links sentences of the type I asked about to
exchanges of the following sort:
		Child: Mom, can I go out?
		Mother: If you like.
In these exchanges, as she writes, "the conditional has been bleached of
conditionality into a mere marker of acquiescence."
	Again, my thanks to everyone - best, Larry Rosenwald