Metonymies as natural inference and activation schemas: The case of dependent clauses as independent speech acts

Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg investigate some if-clauses that look "incomplete, " i.e. lack a syntactically realized consequent clause. Many such "truncated" conditional clauses qualify however as constructions in the sense of Goldberg (1995) because they have a non-compositional conventional sense associated with them. Panther and Thornburg identify three kinds of conventionalized pragmatic functions of such if-clauses: deontic (involving speaker commitment or hearer obligation) as in If you would like a cookie (offer) or If you will come to order (request) ; expressive (e.g. surprise, shock, etc.) as in Why, if it isn't Susan! (expression of surprise) ; and epistemic (reasoning, expression of belief) as in If it was a warning (challenge of a prior assumption). Using the concept of mental space from conceptual blending theory and an approach to indirect speech acts as conceptual scenarios, Panther and Thornburg make extensive use of the cancelability test known from Grice's work on implicature to determine the degree of conventionalization of the if-clause types they investigate. They argue, that many truncated conditionals do not require any inferential work on the part of the hearer even though the metonymic motivation of their pragmatic meaning is still transparent. Panther and Thornburg claim that, on the one hand, conceptual metonymies constitute natural inference schemas that are exploited by participants in linguistic communication to arrive at utterance meanings ; on the other hand, such metonymic inference schemas may become completely entrenched and are then automatically activated in the interpretation process. Whatever the degree of routinization, the availability of metonymic links within conceptual scenarios enables interlocutors to access intended meanings quickly and effortlessly.