Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals

• We regard conditionality as a pragmatic phenomenon rather than a syntactic one.
• Corpus data provide empirical support for a pragmatic category of conditionals.
• Six types of conditional utterance are identified on the basis of both form and meaning.
• Explicit and implicit conditionals can be represented using Default Semantics.
• Our pragmatic category of conditionals has a claim as a semantic/pragmatic universal.

In this paper, we present the benefits of regarding conditionality as a pragmatic phenomenon as compared with approaches based on the syntactic category of a conditional sentence. We propose a pragmatic category of conditionality and justify it using theoretical arguments supported with examples from our database collected from the International Corpus of English-GB. Next, we demonstrate how conditional utterances that pertain to a variety of syntactic constructions can be represented in Default Semantics, a contextualist, truth-conditional approach to utterance meaning. We identify six types of such constructions, using the dimensions of (i) primary vs. secondary meaning (PM/SM index) and (ii) meaning conveyed through sentence structure vs. meaning conveyed at the level of merger representation (WS/Σ index). It is concluded that in view of the diversity of constructions through which conditional thoughts are expressed, conditionality is best regarded as a pragmatic (and as such conceptual) category. Finally, we comment on the status of this claim as a potential semantic/pragmatic universal.