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Evidence from reasoning tasks shows that promises and threats both tend to receive biconditional interpretations. They also both display high speaker control. On the face of it, the only difference seems to be the positive or negative signing of the consequent. In a promise, the speaker tries to persuade the hearer to do something by holding out the prospect of a particular reward; in a threat, the speaker tries to refrain the hearer from doing something by holding out the prospect of a particular punishment. This paper investigates the respects in which conditional promises and threats differ further by means of an inference task. The credibility of the consequent was manipulated in order to examine whether the acceptability ratings of inferences based on promises and on threats would be equally affected. The results of the inference task and an analysis of the reasons people give for their answers suggest that the credibility of promises is less affected by the use of excessive consequents than the credibility of threats. In other words, promise remains debt, whereas threat is another matter.
The idea that conditionals have the same meaning as the truth-functional connective of material implication has slowly but surely disappeared. It is now commonly held that "different sorts of conditionals are differently understood" (Fillenbaum, 1978, p. 184). Psychologists and linguists have directed their attention to more semantically and pragmatically based analyses. Newstead, Ellis, Evans, and Dennis (1997), among others (see e.g., Dieussaert, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2002; Evans, Handley, & Over, 2003; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002), have shown that the different pragmatic types to which conditionals belong, play an important role for their interpretation.
On the basis of this psychological research, promises and threats are mostly treated as a homogeneous group because they display similar behaviour in reasoning tasks. However, the internal differences within the group of inducements (i.e., promises and threats) have not been investigated so far. The aim of the present article is to examine the differences between promises and threats in terms of credibility.
A linguistic analysis suggests potential differences between promises and threats. Searle (1979) set up a typology of illocutionary acts or speech acts, in which he discerns five classes: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. These speech acts differ...