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Subjunctive Conditionals : A Linguistic Analysis - Volume 65

Part of the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series
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A proposal for a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English. In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses.

Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals.

Ippolito's proposal will be of interest both to linguists and to philosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally. Ippolito reviews previous analyses of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals in the work of David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Angelika Kratzer, and others; considers the contrast between future simple past subjunctive conditionals and future past perfect subjunctive conditionals; presents a proposal for subjunctive conditionals that addresses puzzles left unsolved by previous proposals; reviews a number of presupposition triggers showing that they fit the pattern predicted by her proposal; and discusses an asymmetry between the past and the future among subjunctive conditionals, arguing that the best account of our linguistic intuitions must include an indeterministic view of the world.

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Product Details
MIT Press
026251964X / 9780262519649
Paperback / softback
415.6
13/09/2013
United States
English
xii, 159 pages
23 cm
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Learn More