Modals and conditionals play a starring role in philosophical and linguistic research. The ability to think modally distal thoughts is central to the human capacity to plan and choose; and the ability to express such thoughts is central to the human capacity for collective action. Modals and conditionals have yielded a rich bounty of puzzles about logic, semantics, and pragmatics. I organize this chapter around three topics: the interpretation of epistemic modals, particularly how they interact with their local information; the interpretation of conditionals, with a focus on logical questions; and, finally, practical modality, with discussion of a potentially unified perspective on practical modality as essentially involving reference to actions.

Chapter 17 aims to give an integrated account of how subjectivity and intersubjectivity are coded in Korean sentence endings, how such suffixes are diachronically derived from their source constructions, and what typological and socio-cultural factors motivate the emergence and proliferation of such suffixes. The chapter surveys how suffixes index the speaker or both the speaker and addressee as an integral component in their semantic structure. It then examines how such (inter)subjective inflectional suffixes have diachronically been grammaticalized from non-subjective source constructions. The chapter shows that in Korean and in other languages, subjectification tends to lead to intersubjectification and not vice versa. Finally, the chapter argues that the relatively extensive diversity of inflectional suffixes in Korean, especially intersubjective suffixes, is due to two facts: 1) typologically head-final syntax and a typical agglutinative morphology and 2) the time-honored cultural values of hierarchism and collectivism as well as recent dynamic socio-economic mobilities in Korean society and culture.

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.

This chapter draws on independent work on the syntax–semantics interface to motivate a more complex clausal architecture for an assignment-variable-based theory. Binding across syntactic categories and semantic domains is captured uniformly from a generalized binder-index feature, which attaches directly to expressions undergoing movement for type reasons. World-binding (intensionality) arises from the complementizer, which moves from the world-argument position of the clause’s main predicate; assignment-binding arises from modal elements, which move from an internal assignment-argument position of the complementizer. The semantics is fully compositional. The remainder of the book develops the account and applies it to a range of constructions and types of linguistic shifting phenomena.

This chapter aims to address four key issues in the study of the English auxiliary system. The issues involve the properties that distinguish auxiliary verbs from main verbs, ordering restrictions among auxiliary verbs, combinatorial restrictions on the syntactic complements of auxiliary verbs, and auxiliary-sensitive phenomena like negation. The chapter first focuses on the morphosyntactic properties of English auxiliary verbs. We show that their distributional, ordering, and combinatorial properties all follow from their lexical groupings: modals, have/be, do, and to. The second part of this chapter concerns the so-called NICE phenomena, each of which is sensitive to the presence of an auxiliary verb and has been extensively analyzed in generative grammar. The chapter shows us that a construction-based analysis can offer a straightforward analysis of these phenomena, without reliance on movement operations or functional projections.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between editorial work, endonormativity and convergence in the South African context, presenting a corpus-based quantitative case study of how editing reshapes academic writing by users of the STL (White South African English, or WSAfE) and IDG (Black South African English, or BSAfE) strands in South Africa. An inductive, exploratory quantitative method is used to identify linguistic features that distinguish unedited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, and edited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, using a corpus of edited texts and their unedited counterparts. Two features are analysed in detail: the use of downtoners and possibility modals. The findings provide support for the endonormativity of BSAfE, with WSAfE more ambiguous. The two strands are largely divergent in their usage of the two individual features. With a few exceptions, editors leave BSAfE usage patterns unaltered but sometimes change WSAfE usage to be closer to British English usage. Editing thus either leaves the stylistic distance between the two varieties unaltered or increases it. These findings support an assessment of (sometimes problematised) endonormativity at the level of the individual strands, but no strong evidence for convergence.