Chi-Hé Elder

The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the use of offensive humour in stand-up comedy is taking place both off-stage and on-stage: comedians use jokes that target sensitive characteristics ostensibly to show that no topic is ‘off limits’, while also taking a stance against those who argue for more empathetic comedy that does not reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs. Taking Jimmy Carr’s ‘holocaust joke’ (2021) as a case study, we examine the entire life-cycle of jokes from their live-performance context to entering the public sphere, questioning what a joker can be held accountable for in stand-up comedy. Specifically, we look at the performance frame, comedian personality and persona, and how different types of audience may react to a joke, in order to shed light on what exactly it is that the producer of an offensive joke can, or should, be held accountable for.

This chapter acknowledges that the meanings of conditionals have been hotly debated and yet, despite decades of research on this topic, no definitive or agreed upon solution has been reached. Although it has long been acknowledged that conditionals in English are expressed in ways other than using the standard ‘if p, q’ sentence form, and that conditional sentences using ‘if’ can be put to a multitude of uses other than to express conditional thoughts, what is still lacking is an account that brings all of these uses and forms of conditionals together. This chapter sets the research agenda for the remainder of the book, putting forward the claim that the full range of conditionals can be satisfactorily semantically represented only when we locate their meanings at the level of thought.

The conclusion brings together the key findings identified in the analysis of if-conditionals, restating the complexities of meanings that can emerge from the single sentence form ‘if p, q’. It summarises the main arguments that these key findings lead to, including the role of the conditional sentence in relation to the broader conceptual category in which it sits that accounts for the multiplicity of ways in which conditional thoughts can be expressed in everyday communication. In sum, this monograph emphasises the empirical and theoretical benefits of representing meanings at the level of thought: it is only at this conceptual level that we can provide systematicity to the seeming gap between language and thought that is observable in ordinary discourse.

This chapter aims to identify some linguistic and contextual constraints on the kinds of speech acts that conditional sentences can be used to communicate. It proposes a six-way classification of conditional if-sentences as they are used in discourse. The classification maintains the familiar ‘hypothetical’ versus ‘biscuit’ conditional division, but inclusion in these categories is not dependent on a contingency relation between p and q as they are explicitly described, but in terms of the communicative role of p in relation to the overall speech act of the utterance. This forms the basis for the empirical corpus study which is detailed at the end of the chapter.

This chapter proposes a pragmatic definition for the class of conditional thoughts that includes conditional sentences expressing conditional or non-conditional thoughts, and non-conditional sentences expressing conditional thoughts. Two criteria are offered for inclusion in the pragmatic category using the notions of restriction and remoteness. Cross-linguistic evidence provides support for the pragmatic category, as there are languages lacking a conditional connective, yet have the linguistic and contextual resources to express conditionality. A variety of conditionals in English that do not use ‘if’ are also subjected to the pragmatic criteria. The chapter finishes by proposing to view conditionality as a cognitive universal that is operative in human thought and that is present in the semantic representation of natural language conditional utterances.

This chapter aims to provide greater systematicity to the relationship between the two dimensions of the classification offered in Chapter 5 using the theoretical tools of Default Semantics. It starts by specifying the main sources of information that take us from an if-conditional to its primary meaning in discourse. It then moves to familiar debates on the indicative-subjunctive distinction, and on the role of conditional perfection (the tendency to ‘perfect’ conditionals into bi-conditionals), examining the roles these phenomena play in the construction of primary meanings. Finally, some example representations of conditional utterances using the concept of a ‘merger representation’ from Default Semantics are offered at the end of the chapter.

Two key questions that have plagued philosophical and linguistic debates on the meanings of conditionals are: (i) do conditionals have truth conditions? And if so, (ii) what are these truth conditions? This chapter begins by revisiting familiar arguments against the material conditional as a psychologically plausible basis for the semantics of conditionals. It also defends the assumption that conditionals lend themselves to a truth-conditional treatment, thus rejecting the no-truth value account of conditionals, arguing against those views that combat the psychological plausibility of applying truth conditions to counterfactual conditionals. It then moves to current mainstream views on the semantics of conditionals, including the more philosophically-oriented Lewis-Stalnaker truth conditions using possible-worlds semantics, and the view most dominantly followed in linguistics, the ‘restrictor view’ from Kratzer. It settles on adopting Stalnakerian truth conditions for their flexibility in operating at different levels of representation, before finishing by reflecting on the scope of analysis of each of the main contenders.

This chapter discusses ‘biscuit conditionals’: a species of conditional in which the consequent is conditionally independent from the antecedent. It identifies a number of criteria by which biscuit conditionals are typically distinguished, before examining various types of biscuit conditionals, including conditional speech acts, metalinguistic conditionals, and directive if-clauses. It concludes that the dividing line between hypothetical conditionals and biscuit conditionals is not as clear-cut as might first appear, and moreover, from a functional point of view the distinction does not always make sense. The upshot is that there must be other principles for deriving the intuitive, primary meaning that a conditional gives rise to which is tangential to the criterion of the conditional relationship between the explicitly uttered parts.

This chapter argues that in order to develop a semantics that encompasses conditionals both with and without ‘if’, an explanatorily adequate semantic theory of conditionals in discourse has to kick the object of semantic study beyond that of the sentence to the level of speech acts. It provides a brief history of the debate regarding the degree to which context can inform truth-conditional content before proposing the radical contextualist theory of Default Semantics as one that can adequately capture the meanings of conditionals as they are used and understood by speakers; a brief introduction to the theory is offered at the end of the chapter.

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague, leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful as long as the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’.

This paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguistic if you like as a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguistic if you like is polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker’s reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due to the ‘if p, q’ sentence form. That is, although the metalinguistic reading is most likely obtained automatically by default, it also carries an available conditional reading that is akin to other metalinguistic conditional clauses such as if you see what I mean. Next, a semantic representation of metalinguistic if you like is developed that takes on board a characterization of conditionality that departs from lexico-grammatical conventions, such that conditionals of the form ‘if p, q’ no longer bear a one-to-one correspondence with “conditional” truth conditions. Employing a radical contextualist semantic framework in which the unit of truth-conditional analysis is not constrained to the sentence form, utterances employing metalinguistic if you like are given a semantic representation such that the if-clause does not contribute propositional content, yet they also maintain their status as conditionals as the sentence form gives rise to a potential conditional secondary meaning.

This book proposes a semantic theory of conditionals that can account for (i) the variability in usages that conditional sentences can be put; and (ii) both conditional sentences of the form ‘if p, q’ and those conditional thoughts that are expressed without using ‘if’. It presents theoretical arguments as well as empirical evidence from English and other languages in support of the thesis that an adequate study of conditionals has to go beyond an analysis of specific sentence forms or lexical items. The resulting perspective on conditionals is one in which conditionality is located at a higher level than that of the sentence; namely, at the level of thought. The author argues that it is only through adopting such a perspective, and with it, a commitment to context-dependent semantics, that we can successfully represent conditional utterances as they are used and understood by ordinary language users. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on the semantics of conditionals in the fields of linguistics (especially semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy of language.