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},
url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:121835633}
}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…
73 Citations
Actualistic interpretations in French
- 2021
Linguistics
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…
The structures and meanings of might-counterfactuals: a view from Japanese
- 2025
Linguistics, Philosophy
Might-counterfactuals (e.g., if John had been at the party, Mary might have been happier) have been observed, primarily by philosophers, to have a range of interpretations that are apparently absent…
On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries
- 2009
Linguistics
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
- 2010
Philosophy
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
- 2017
Linguistics
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
- 2014
Philosophy
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.
A Uniform Theory of Conditionals
- 2013
Philosophy
A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for…
On Stalnaker ’ s unified theory of conditionals
- 2012
Philosophy, Linguistics
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
- 2009
Philosophy, Linguistics
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
- 2019
Linguistics
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…
52 References
On the Consequences ofEvent-Quantification in Counterfactual Conditionals
- 2006
Linguistics, Philosophy
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
- 2005
Linguistics
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
- 1999
Linguistics, Philosophy
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
- 2002
Linguistics, Philosophy
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
- 2003
Linguistics
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
- 1997
Philosophy
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
- 2003
Linguistics, Philosophy
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
- 1986
Linguistics
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
- 2003
Linguistics
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
- 1984
Linguistics
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.