If you recall, biscuit conditionals are weird

Biscuit conditionals are constructions like “There are biscuits on the table, if you want them,”
which despite their familiar lexico-syntactic form do not convey conditional semantics in the
traditional sense. The antecedent’s condition is not being placed on the consequent’s truth, but
rather on its relevance and felicity. This becomes apparent when splitting up the conditional into
two turns and rephrasing the antecedent as a question. The response to the biscuit question
now determines whether the consequent needs to be uttered or not.
Other non-conditional conditionals (NCCs) follow the same pattern, like discourse-structuring
conditionals (“If you promise not to tell anyone, Kirsten is asleep”), where the condition is—quite
paradoxically—on the speech act of revealing the consequent, and “reverse biscuits” (“If you
recall, whales are mammals”), where uttering the consequent is relevant if the antecedent is
false.
I will discuss some data from English, Chinese, and German (which has interesting word order
effects correlating with biscuit-ness) and propose a preliminary pragmatics-oriented account of
both true conditionals and NCC as speech act conditionals, which attempts to unify their syntax
and semantics.