Subjunctive biscuit and stand-off conditionals

The Pragmatics of Biscuit Conditionals

links the clauses “you need anything” and “I’m Jill” in a conditional construction, but semantically we may naturally perceive the propositions expressed by these clauses as conditionally unrelated; the name of the woman does not depend on whether the addressee needs anything or not. To humorously misapprehend such conditional sentences, as Martin does, is to pretend to see a conditional relati...

On the Semantic Composition of Subjunctive Conditionals

In this paper, I offer a unified semantic analysis of subjunctive conditionals that purports to account for their truth and felicity-conditions. The proposal is centered on the claim that the temporal morphology that occurs in subjunctive conditionals in several genetically unrelated languages plays an essential role in the composition of their meaning. I will argue for a time-dependent notion ...

Towards a semantics for biscuit conditionals

This essay proposes a semantic analysis of biscuit-conditionals, such as Austin’s classic example ‘‘there are biscuits in the cupboard if you want some’’. The analysis is grounded on the ideas of contextual restrictions, and of non-character encoded aspects of meaning, and provides a rigorous framework for the widespread intuitions that (i) the if-clause in a biscuit-conditional is truth-condit...

Comments on Juan Comesana: Knowledge and Subjunctive Conditionals

Juan Comesana considers some recent proposals regarding the relation between knowledge and subjunctive conditionals, including those by Dretske and Nozick recommending a " sensitivity " condition on knowledge, and by Sosa recommending a " safety " condition. Comesana raises problems for each of the positions he considers, and at the end of the paper he expresses pessimism about the prospects fo...

A Schema-Based Approach to Understanding Subjunctive Conditionals