The rapport effect in conditionals explained by Discourse Coherence Theory

Maxime BOURLIER, Student master degree, Université Paris 8, CHArt Laboratory, France

When we present participants with conditionals « If A, C », they tend to reject them if there is no link between A and C. This trend is called the relevance effect. Some suggest that this relevance effect reflect the requirement of a link between A and C for the conditional to be true. It’s the inferentialist position. Others think the relevance effect is explained by the general need for two utterances to be coherently bind together. This idea is supported by suppositionalists. It’s the one we defend in this study. We Compared the interpretation of sentences under 3 forms : the conditional form « If A, C », the conjunctive form « A and C » and the juxtapositional form « A. C ». We made the assumption that those 3 sentence forms would all be interpreted in the same way. They would be so when the two utterances bound within are linked as well as when they’re not.