Meaning Meaning - Jingyi Chen / The modal harmony analysis of anankastic conditionals
Meaning Meaning - Jingyi Chen / The modal harmony analysis of anankastic conditionals
Friday April 12, the Meaning Meeting meets bright and early at 9:00am, and Jingyi presents her work with Valentine on anankastic conditionals, of the sort "If you want to get a decent croissant for cheap, you have to go to Lidl." An abstract follows.
Standard accounts of modals and conditionals fail to derive the correct meaning of anankastic conditionals, such as "If you want to get to China in less than a week, you have to fly." This has led to proposals for an idiosyncratic semantics of want or a hidden purpose clause construction. We argue that the problem is more general, and its solution must be the same: modals of any flavor can give rise to what we will call "harmonizing" readings, where the complement of an attitude verb in the antecedent directly restricts the modal in the consequent. We propose a general constraint on modal domain restrictions in conditionals, which derives harmonizing readings without relying on any flavor-specific idiosyncrasies.