Valentine at UCLA

Anankastics at alma mater.

May 23 Valentine Hacquard is at UCLA Linguistics, her undergraduate alma mater, presenting  joint work with Jingyi Chen, "Being pragmatic about anankastic conditionals," in their colloquium series. Anakastics are conditionals like "If you want to get to Irvine, you have take the 405," with an attitude predicate in the antecedent. The puzzle these raise is, the attitude seems irrelevant to the requirement stated in the consequent. Valentine and Jingyi give a largely pragmatic explanation of why, based on the idea that the attitude implies a requirement of the same sort as what is stated in the consequent.