A Unified Analysis of Indicative and Biscuit Conditionals as Topics

We show syntactic and semantic similarities of two types of conditionals with fronted antecedents (normal indicative conditionals and biscuit conditionals) and two types of left dislocation constructions in German (german left dislocation and hanging topic left dislocation), which mark two types of topicality (aboutness topicality and frame setting topicality). On basis of these similarities we argue that (the antecedent if-clauses of) ICs and BCs are aboutness topics and frame setting topics, respectively. Concerning our analysis, we first extend the approach to abountess topicality of Endriss (to appear) to frame setting topics to derive the semantic and pragmatic contribution for the left dislocation constructions. Then we apply it to the analysis of indicative conditionals of Schlenker (2004) and show how it accounts for both types of conditionals. We thus propose one uniform approach to the interpretation of topicality that accounts for the left dislocation constructions as well as the two types of conditionals.

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