There are many ways of talking conditionally, about what will or would be the case in certain hypothetical situations. We are interested in the various linguistic forms that are available for expressing such meanings in English and across languages.
The first part of the talk is concerned with English if-then sentences. They create special environments for the interpretation of their constituents. Specifically, the semantic contribution of temporal, aspectual and modal expressions in conditionals can differ in puzzling ways from their "ordinary" meaning in simple matrix clauses. We present a framework for the analysis of such apparent mismatches, developed for English if-sentences and tested against a range of other languages and constructions. Among its hallmarks is an integrated analysis of "indicative" and "subjunctive" conditionals, as well as a novel approach to the role of "fake Past" in conditionals.
In the second part of the talk, we turn to a set of expressions which can be recruited for the expression of conditional meanings, even though that is not their prototypical function. Their analysis tests the potential as well as the limits of the approach introduced earlier. Specifically, sentential conjunctions and juxtapositions are also well-known to give rise to (indicative) conditional meanings. The effect itself can be analyzed as a form of topicalization, but this leaves unexplained puzzling restrictions on what sorts of conditionals can be expressed in this way. We argue that these patterns provide evidence to rethink the landscape of conditional theorizing: what are standardly considered competing frameworks constitute two strategies for expressing hypothetical conditionals that are both employed in natural language.
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