“Deontic commitments in conditional promises and threats” – Dr Magdalena Sztencel and Dr Leesa Clarke

Promises and threats play a central role in human communication, from family life to negotiation and politics.

– Sztencel and Clarke

This paper from the Journal of Language and Cognition examines two types of cognitive factors that are assumed to underpin people’s interpretation of conditional promises and threats.

We would like to argue that there is a real need for research into the interaction between (a) the interlocutor-specific information and (b) the inferential patterns that lead to the assumption,

– Sztencel and Clarke (463)

This paper can be downloaded here.