Subjunctive Conditionals: A Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form, this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals. Ippolito’s proposal will be of interest both to linguists and to philosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally.