Abstract According to virtually all major theories of conditionals, conditionals with a true antecedent and a true consequent are true. Yet conditionals whose antecedent and consequent have nothing to do with each other—so-called missing-link conditionals—strike us as odd, regardless of the truth values of their constituent clauses. Most theorists attribute this apparent oddness to pragmatics, but on a recent proposal, it rather betokens a semantic defect. Research in experimental pragmatics suggests that people can be more or less sensitive to pragmatic cues and may be inclined to differing degrees to evaluate a true sentence carrying a false implicature as false. We report the results of an empirical study that investigated whether people’s sensitivity to false implicatures is associated with how they tend to evaluate missing-link conditionals with true clauses. These results shed light on the question of whether missing-link conditionals are best seen as pragmatically infelicitous or rather as semantically defective.

中文翻译：

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缺少链接的条件：在实用上不客气还是在语义上有缺陷？

摘要实际上，根据条件的所有主要理论，具有真实先例和真实结果的条件是真实的。然而，其先行条件和后继条件彼此无关的条件（所谓的缺失链接条件）使我们感到奇怪，无论其构成子句的真值如何。大多数理论家将这种明显的奇怪归因于实用主义，但是在最近的提议中，它宁可将其视为语义上的缺陷。对实验语用学的研究表明，人们可能或多或少对语用线索敏感，并可能在不同程度上倾向于将带有假含意的真实句子评估为假。我们报告了一项实证研究的结果，该研究调查了人们对错误含义的敏感度是否与他们倾向于评估带有真实从句的缺失链接条件的方式有关。这些结果阐明了缺失链接条件是否最好被视为在实用上是愚蠢的，或者在语义上是有缺陷的问题。