‘Practical’, if that’s the word (2020)

Abstract: Certain conditionals have something other than a clause as their consequent: their antecedent if-clauses are ‘adverbial clauses’ without a verb. We argue that they function in a way already seen for those with clausal consequents, despite lacking the content we might expect for the formation of a conditional. The use of the if-clause with sub-clausal consequents is feasible thanks to the fact that this function does not depend on the consequent content, and so is not impeded when the consequent does not provide a proposition, question or imperative. To support this we provide meaning rules for conditionals in terms of information state updates, letting the same construction play out in different ways depending on context and content.

## introduction biscuit conditionals are a subset of conditionals well-discussed for their deviance from typical hypothetical conditionals in terms of truth conditions, acceptability, and information conveyed. within biscuit conditionals, there is a further metalinguistic subset like (1) foot_0 which are used to manage communication more directly: ## if -conditionals and internal coherence there are competing approaches to the analysis of biscuit conditionals. one branch attempts to explain the differences from hypothetical conditionals through a fundamental semantic distinction @xcite . this usually incorporates a version of the performative hypothesis @xcite , whereby the performance of speech acts is a part of clause structure. this prefix is at a different level in the structure depending on the type of conditional: for biscuit conditionals, this could be glossed as if you are hungry, [i assert that] there are biscuits on the sideboard. biscuit conditionals are often called speech-act conditionals in reference to the intuition that they condition speech acts (or some aspect thereof) directly. @xcite in particular have returned an updated edition of this theory of speech acts to more mainstream thinking, but we will not be taking such a directly syntactic approach here. rather than a component of syntactic structure, we follow @xcite in identifying illocutionary force as part of the semantics of certain lexical items, phrases and clause types, reflecting the action a speaker of the utterance believes themselves to have performed in uttering it. the second group of approaches maintains that the differences between hypothetical and biscuit conditionals can be explained through pragmatic means @xcite . a pragmatic approach to biscuit conditionals is taken here: if possible, it is preferable to handle the differences through general principles and a unified analysis, rather than developing a semantic split. we will return to this when introducing the model used later. metalinguistic conditionals, including lexical hedges, are sometimes discussed as a subset of biscuit conditionals, since they too lack the intuitive link between the antecedent and consequent case found in hypothetical conditionals. @xcite recognise 'metalinguistic-p conditionals', which make a comment on "the form of the q-clause [consequent-clause], on the choice of words in it or on the pronunciation of a word", but do not particularly propose an analysis, or very clearly distinguish them from 'speech conditiondefining-p conditionals'. @xcite makes a specific corpus case study of if you like, but otherwise classes lexical hedges amongst other metalinguistic conditionals which function as an 'illocutionary force hedge', while @xcite include them among the class of other metalinguistic comments rather than discussing them in the context of other conditionals. @xcite distinguishes 'metatextual' conditionals (e.g. both (1) and ( 2 )), from 'speechact' conditionals (i.e. standard biscuit conditionals), although discussing the whole clause as the "consequent" in both cases. dancygier's copious use of scare quotes indicates discomfort with as-sessing the entire clause as consequent, but the alternative that the consequent is the "focus" itself rather than the clause, is not explored. however, we consider the analysis of a comment on a single word as re-setting the entire utterance as a conditional to be unappealing, as will be briefly discussed in section 2.1. ## conclusion the most common semantics for conditionals is founded on if as restricting the scope of another (potentially covert) operator @xcite . however, we have seen that if -clauses may be associated with only a constituent, and a conditional effect introduced by if can evidently arise without participating in a process via a main clause. although we cannot provide extended discussion, the above provides more motivation for seeking another way to replicate the restrictor theory's advantages. one appeal of the restrictor theory is that it evades proofs by @xcite showing that one could have a semantics for conditionals that reflects the intuitive (and eventually empirically verified) judgement that a conditional is as probable as its consequent given its antecedent @xcite , or a semantics whereby conditionals express propositions, but not both. one alternative for avoiding this problem is to take on a trivalent semantics, and although lewis considered it too extreme a solution, use of a trivalent semantics for conditionals remains an active albeit nonmainstream area. in addition to being interesting in its own right, the phenomenon addressed here hopefully provides food for thought in what a semantics for conditionals needs to accommodate.