Valentine at NYU on anankastics

If the website says it's on Friday, it has to be on Friday.

Friday March 21, Valentine finishes Spring Break at NYU's linguistics colloquium, presenting her joint work with Jingyi Chen on "Being pragmatic about Anankastic Conditionals." 

An example of such a conditional is, "If you want to get to Greenland, you have to go by boat or plane." These raise a semantic problem. The antecedent supposes a desire ("you want") but that desire is irrelevant to the necessity claim in the consequent: getting to Greenland requires a boat or plane even if you don't want to go there. This has led analysts to propose a special semantics for the conditional or for "want". Valentine and Jingyi advocate a less stipulative and more pragmatic account, based on a new observation. Turns out the challenging pattern is not peculiar to "want" and teleological modality, but is replicated with other attitude verbs and modalities - such as "think" and epistemic modality - whenever the antecedent "attitude(p)" warrants the pragmatic inference that p is necessary in a modality "harmonic" to that of the attitude. The common semantics for conditionals will then use this necessity claim to restrict the interpretation of the consequent, and deliver the observed data.