Were, Would, Might and a Compositional Account of Counterfactuals

This paper has two purposes. We first give a new dynamic account of epistemic modal operators that account for both their test-like behaviour with respect to whole information states and their capacity to induce quantificational dependencies across worlds (modal subordination). We then use this theo...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of semantics (Nijmegen) 2007-05, Vol.24 (2), p.93-129
Main Authors: Asher, Nicholas, McCready, Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Descriptive studies and applied theories
Linguistics
Metaphysics
Reading
Semantics
Semantics and pragmatics
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper has two purposes. We first give a new dynamic account of epistemic modal operators that account for both their test-like behaviour with respect to whole information states and their capacity to induce quantificational dependencies across worlds (modal subordination). We then use this theory, together with an analysis of conditionals and irrealis moods, to give a fully compositional semantics of indicative and counterfactual conditionals. In our analysis, the distinction between counterfactual and indicative conditionals follows directly from the interaction between the semantics of the conditional and irrealis operators and the semantics of the particular modals involved in the conditional consequent. We indicate some theoretical and logical consequences of our approach.
ISSN:0167-5133
1477-4593
DOI:10.1093/jos/ffl013