In this Book
- Subjunctive Conditionals: A Linguistic Analysis
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: The MIT Press
- Series: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
summary
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Series Foreword
- pp. ix-x
- 1 Introduction
- pp. 1-20
- 3 A Compositional Analysis
- pp. 53-116
- 4 Presuppositions
- pp. 117-130
- 6 Conclusion
- pp. 137-140
- References
- pp. 151-156
- Other Works in the Series
- pp. 174-177
Additional Information
ISBN
9780262314879
Related ISBN(s)
9780262019484
MARC Record
OCLC
861199701
Pages
216
Launched on MUSE
2013-10-21
Language
English
Open Access
No