Abstract Indicative conditionals are known to have the semantic property of nonveridicality, that is, they do not entail the truth of the antecedent. In this paper, I argue that the nonveridicality property of indicative conditionals is elastic in that it can be affected by the choice of conditional connectives and negative polarity items. Two experiments are reported, one on German and the other on English. They show that in both languages, the presence of negative polarity items conveys a weakened speaker commitment towards the antecedent, although there is cross-linguistic variation concerning the effect of conditional connectives.

中文翻译：

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指示条件的弹性非垂直性

摘要指示性条件句具有非标准性的语义特性，即它们并不包含先行事实的真相。在本文中，我认为指示性条件的非垂直性是有弹性的，因为它会受到条件性连接词和负极性项目的选择的影响。据报道，有两个实验，一个是德语，另一个是英语。他们表明，在两种语言中，负极性项目的存在都降低了说话者对先行者的承诺，尽管有关条件连接词的效果存在跨语言变化。