When aspect matters: the case of would-conditionals

@article{Arregui2007WhenAM,
  title={When aspect matters: the case of would-conditionals},
  author={Ana Arregui},
  journal={Natural Language Semantics},
  year={2007},
  volume={15},
  pages={221-264}
}
  • Ana Arregui
  • Published 12 September 2007
  • Philosophy
  • Natural Language Semantics
Differences in the interpretation of would-conditionals with simple (perfective) and perfect antecedent clauses are marked enough to discourage a unified view. However, this paper presents a unified, Lewis–Stalnaker style semantics for the modal in such constructions. Differences in the interpretation of the conditionals are derived from the interaction between the interpretation of different types of aspect and the modal. The paper makes a distinction between perfective and perfect aspect in… 
View on Springer
55 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
15

55 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Actualistic interpretations in French
Actuality Entailments (AEs), which are standardly described in relation to modal predicates, are known to only occur in the perfective. This article argues that modal predicates are stative and, for…
On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries
TLDR
It is proposed that implicative readings are contingent on the relative position of the modal w.r.t. aspect, and this proposal enables us to solve the puzzle while maintaining a standardized semantics for aspects and modals.
Detaching if-clauses from should
This paper investigates some aspects of the semantics of deontic should-conditionals. The main objective is to understand which actual world facts make deontic statements true. The starting point for…
Fake Perfect in X-marked Conditionals
The topic of this paper is a problem concerning the interpretation of tense in conditionals: Fake Tense. Fake Tense refers to the observation that in English subjunctive conditionals the Simple Past,…
A Uniform Theory of Conditionals
TLDR
It is shown that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents) and broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here.
On Stalnaker ’ s unified theory of conditionals
A problem for Stalnaker (1975, 2011)’s unified theory of indicative and subjunctive conditionals is raised. Several solutions to the problem are discussed and rejected. The tentative conclusion is…
On similarity in counterfactuals
TLDR
An analysis according to which counterfactuals are treated as predications “de re” over past situations in the actual world, with de re predication over particular facts being treated as law-like conditionals.
The Past Tense View of Counterfactuals Revisited
  • Moritz Schulz
  • Philosophy, Linguistics
    Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy
  • 2019
What is the best way of classifying different types of conditionals? According to what has become the traditional view, there is a substantive semantic difference between indicative conditionals and…
The semantic ingredients of imperfectivity in progressives, habituals, and counterfactuals
This paper develops a unified analysis for the meaning of imperfective aspect that covers progressives, habituals, and counterfactuals, aiming at an understanding of two crosslinguistically frequent…
A birelational analysis of the Russian imperfective
TLDR
This paper solves two puzzles for a theory of aspect by appealing to the structure of atomic vs. non-atomic events and revealing that aspectual meaning involves both temporal information and information about discourse connectivity.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 53 REFERENCES
On the Consequences ofEvent-Quantification in Counterfactual Conditionals
TLDR
It is argued that a unified analysis for would can be maintained once the authors recognize the differences in the semantic contribution made to the antecedent clause by aspectual heads that quantify over events versus aspectual Heads that make reference to events.
Conditional Truth and Future Reference
TLDR
A compositional model-theoretic account of the way the interpretation of indicative conditionals is determined and constrained by the temporal and modal expressions in their constituents, which sheds new light on the relationship between ‘non-predictive’ and ‘epistemic’ readings of indicative Conditionals.
Context And Content
Context figures in the interpretation of utterances in many different ways. In the tradition of possible-worlds semantics, the seminal account of context-sensitive expressions such as indexicals and…
Pointing at Jack, Talking about Jill: Understanding Deferred Uses of Demonstratives and Pronouns
TLDR
It is argued that, contrary to initial impressions, occurrences of demonstratives and pronouns must be treated as semantically identical to ordinary, perceptual uses of these expression–types, and that this finding has important repercussions for the view of the scope and limits of a semantic theory.
Presuppositions and Implicatures in Counterfactuals
In this article, I propose a semantic account of temporally mismatched past subjunctive counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal…
The Presupposition of Subjunctive Conditionals
Why are some conditionals subjunctive? It is often assumed that at least one crucial difference is that subjunctive conditionals presuppose that their antecedent is false, that they are…
The (Temporal) Semantics and (Modal) Pragmatics of the Perfect
TLDR
The proposal made here draws much for the Extended Now theory, but improves on it by showing that many aspects of the perfect's meaning may be factored out into independent semantic or pragmatic principles.
Tense And Modality
TLDR
The more traditional intensional constructions are rather operators on propositions, such as modality or tense, but the generalization made in Chapter 3 to arbitrary extensional categories, a similar move is possible for intensional notions.
On the stativity of the English perfect
TLDR
The aspectual class of perfect predicates, such as love coffee, know French, and be hungry, are clearly distinguished in a number of ways from event predicates.
Conditional interpretations of if‐sentences
TLDR
This essay attempts the ambitious project of engaging readers of both stamps, upon a topic which, when all is said and done, has occupied logicians and grammarians separately for centuries.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...