8 - Conditionals

Summary

Chapters 9–10 explore how the assignment-variable-based treatments of relativization and pronominal anaphora with noun phrases may be extended to capture shifting phenomena in other clausal structures, such as conditionals, correlatives, and questions. This chapter develops a syntax/semantics for ‘if’-clauses as free relatives, interpreted as plural definite descriptions of assignments (possibilities). Clause-internal movement of a (possibly implicit) definite/maximality operator introduces quantification over assignments. The compositional semantics affords a uniform analysis of ‘if’-clauses in diverse types of conditionals—conditionals with ‘if’-clauses in post-nominal, sentence-final, and sentence-initial positions, and conditionals with/without an overt modal or ‘then’. The choice-function-based analyses of anaphoric pronouns as copies of a linguistic antecedent are extended to anaphoric proforms in correlatives. Comparisons between conditional correlatives and correlatives of individuals are briefly considered.