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The meaning of counterfactual conditionals is standardly described using the similarity approach (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). This approach has recently been challenged by Ciardelli et al. (2018). They argue that the similarity approach is in principle unable to account for the meaning of counterfactuals with an antecedent consisting of a conjunction embedded under a negation (¬(p^q)). Ciardelli et al. (2018) dismiss the approach on these grounds and offer an alternative. The main goal of the present paper is to defend the similarity approach against this attack. I will argue that the problem that underlies the observations in Ciardelli et al. 2018 is more general and not solved by the solution they offer. I will furthermore argue, against Ciardelli et al. (2018), that the cause of the problem is not the similarity approach, but the interaction of negation with the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. The paper will conclude with a first outline of a solution for the problem, which still uses the similarity approach, but combines it with an alternative semantics for negation.
Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clauses contain an identity statement, e.g. "If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress". Here, we argue that counteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticals and dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggest an analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dream reports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized as centered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of 'if' licenses the presence of an 'imagine'-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause "x be-PAST y" is taken under. The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.
To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of the identity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporate Percus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has several advantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning, as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals and correctly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.
I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentences aren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributing these entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided by some contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.