Turkish “unless” is not biconditional unless the pragmatic context allows it (original) (raw)

Turkish "unless" is not biconditional unless the pragmatic context allows it Hearing the utterance Unless you press the button, the alarm will not stop, one would infer that (i) the alarm should stop upon a button-press, and that (ii) somebody must have pressed the button upon hearing the alarm stopping. This pattern of reasoning demonstrates that the connective unless receives a biconditional interpretation in this example. It has long been suspected that biconditionality of unless is not a lexically given semantic absolute, but a function of the broader syntactic/semantic organization of the hosting sentence. Particularly, while unless gets a biconditional interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (PQC) (e.g., every), it gets a uniconditional reading in negative quantificational contexts (NQC) (e.g., no). [1, 2] Yet, exceptive accounts take unless to be biconditional in all contexts. [3] To our knowledge, there exists no consensus on either the descriptive facts about unless or how to model its meaning. [4] We aim to contribute to this research with two experiments on the semantics of Turkish unless. Exp-1 explores the effect of pragmatic context on the interpretation of unless and Exp-2 investigates its interaction with quantifiers.