Meaning Meeting - David Boylan / Conditional restriction
Meaning Meeting - David Boylan / Conditional restriction
Wednesday November 13, the Meaning Meeting hosts David Boylan, from the University of Glasgow, who will present his recent work on how the antecedent of a conditional restricts a modal its consequent, abstracted below.
Conditionals restrict modal domains: in sentences of the form A > MODAL B, the modal quantifies only over worlds where the antecedent is true. This paper has two aims. The first is to derive these data axiomatically, giving a logic for the conditional which has as theorems the axiomatic regimentations of the restrictor data. The second is to show that this logic does not require the conditional to be a pure restrictor, as in Kratzer 1981, 1986; it is sound on a restricting operator semantics, where conditionals shift worlds and accessibility relations. I note that the restricting operator semantics offers a picture whereby conditionals can restrict without that being their only semantic function. This account sidesteps a notorious difficulty for Kratzer’s semantics, the existence of bare conditionals.