서강대학교

초록/요약

This thesis explores the interpretations of conditionals within the framework of neo-Gricean pragmatics. The strong semantic tradition in the study of conditionals, especially those in English, has regarded them mainly as a truth-functional semantic entity. It has paid much less attention to the non-truth-functional aspects in the interpretations of conditionals. However, this study is an attempt to provide substantial evidence that they are not understood as a truth-functional entity but that they must be understood in the dynamic relations between protases and apodoses in which individuals with different beliefs transact with each other. To this end, we first focus on the typology of conditionals. Unlike the traditional distinction of conditionals, we argue that there are two large classes of conditionals: open conditionals and closed conditionals. Based on the classification of conditionals, we discuss the relations between protasis and apodosis generated from the conditional structure. The relations discussed and rearranged include Causality, Inferential relation, Speech act relation and Nonce relation. Then we turn to possible implicature types of conditionals. In general, conditionals can have, by nature, what Levinson calls (2000) Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) and clausal implicatures, but we will argue that when the conditional expressions have counterfactuality, their potential implicatures may disappear. In discussing this, we show that the heuristics and principles, Q, I, and M, proposed by Levinson (2000) can be applied to the analysis of conditionals in English. This leads us to review the non-standard devices of conditionality, i.e. expressions having a conditional reading without if. Finally, neo-Gricean principles are used to illuminate distinctive conditional aspects and their optional application crosslinguistically. Comparing counterfactuals of English and Korean, Korean counterfactuals are much simpler morphologically and more indeterminate in their interpretations than English counterfactual conditionals. In the interpretations of conditionals, they do not make sense without their discourse context plus the speaker''s attitude along with neo-Gricean principles. When we take the pragmatic principles as a parameter, neo-Gricean principles can be considered one of the parametric options across languages.