Experimental semantics and pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Cognitive science.
Conditional reasoning, a crucial component of human cognition, often involves interpreting 'if-then' scenarios in ways that goes beyond their literal, logical meanings. For instance, consider the following conditional statement: 'If you mow the lawn, you will receive five dollars'. Logically, this holds true even if one gets five dollars for a different task, but people usually interpret it as 'If and only if you mow the lawn, you will receive five dollars.' This is known as Conditional Perfection.
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Counterfactuals enable us to imagine scenarios different from reality, often conveying meanings understood by contrasting potential realities. For example, the statement 'If there had been zebras, there would have been lions in the zoo' implies a hypothetical world with these animals, yet indicates their absence in reality. This involves mentally contrasting the actual world with the hypothetical one suggested by the counterfactual.
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In natural communication settings, ambiguous referring expressions like 'she', 'that', 'there', 'then' are rarely encountered without context. They usually appear after a meaningful discourse, enabling the construction of plausible hypotheses about their reference. Even within coherent discourse, identifying the correct reference among multiple alternatives is complex, involving understanding who or what the utterance is about, the event, the participants and their roles, and the relationship of the utterance to other discourse elements. Focusing on Turkish, with Duygu Özge, we examine how null and overt pronouns are interpreted across different verb types, coherence relations, valency, and word order.