{"id":21696,"date":"2015-10-15T14:46:25","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T19:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=21696"},"modified":"2015-10-15T14:58:03","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T19:58:03","slug":"if-youre-just-joining-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=21696","title":{"rendered":"\"If you're just joining me, …\""},"content":{"rendered":"

On Facebook, Mike Pope asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On \"Fresh Air,\" Terri Gross says:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"If you're just joining me, my guest today is …\". <\/span><\/p>\n

What she DOESN'T mean is:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"… but if you're NOT just joining me, my guest is …\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Linguists: who can help us understand how \"if\" here is not a simplistic conditional? Any links welcome. Thx.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Understanding is hard, but naming is easier: Ms. Gross is using an if-clause to express a certain sort of \"felicity condition<\/a>\".\u00a0For us to (felicitously) inform someone of something, it should not be the case that they\u00a0already know it. As a sort of protection against the chance that this condition is not\u00a0met, people use\u00a0all sorts of\u00a0felicitousness-hedges like \"In case you missed it\" (common enough to be abbreviated ICYMI), \"In case you didn't know\", \"If you didn't know\", \"As you probably already know\", \"In case you've forgotten\", and so on.\u00a0\"If you're just joining\u00a0us\/me\" is an informativeness-hedge that's especially appropriate for broadcast conversations, since people tune in and out at irregular times.<\/p>\n

One way to make sense of such conditionals is to imagine a latent performative verb: \"If you're just joining us, I hereby inform you that my guest today is …\" And now \u00a0the implicit clause \"… but if you're NOT just joining us\" makes sense, with the continuation \"… you already know that\".<\/p>\n

Examples of this type are one type of\u00a0\"relevance conditional\", and we discussed them (with a cartoon!) in \"If you think about it<\/a>\", 6\/1\/2009. Relevance conditionals are also known as \"biscuit conditionals\" in the literature, following an\u00a0example from J.L. Austin's 1970 paper \"Ifs and cans\",<\/p>\n

There are biscuits in the sideboard if you want some.<\/span><\/p>\n

where the felicity condition in question has to do with your level of interest rather than with your state of knowledge.<\/p>\n

An\u00a0implication of this style of analysis — the general outlines of which go back to Austin's 1955 William James Lectures\u00a0How to do things with words<\/a><\/em> — is that (the appropriate translations of) such conditions should be found in all languages and cultures. Whether that's true I don't know.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Facebook, Mike Pope asks: On \"Fresh Air,\" Terri Gross says: \"If you're just joining me, my guest today is …\". What she DOESN'T mean is: \"… but if you're NOT just joining me, my guest is …\" Linguists: who can help us understand how \"if\" here is not a simplistic conditional? Any links welcome. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-language","category-pragmatics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21696"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21704,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696\/revisions\/21704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}