Anankastic conditionals again

Abstract

The object of our investigation is expressing necessary conditions in natural language, particularly in a certain kind of conditional sentences, the so-called Anankastic Conditionals (ACs), a topic brought into the linguistic discussion by the seminal papers Sæbø (1986) and Sæbø (2001). A typical AC is the following sentence, Sæbø’s standard example: (1) If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train. Sæbø analyses the sentence by means of the modal theory in Kratzer (1981), according to which a modal has two contextual parameters, a modal base f(w) and an ordering source g(w). The modal base contains relevant facts and the ordering source contains an ideal like wishes, moral laws and the like. Normally, the antecedent of a necessity-conditional is added to the modal base. Sæbø’s new proposal for the analysis of the AC is that the antecedent without the information ‘you want’, called inner antecedent, is added to the ordering source. Sæbø’s analysis had remained almost unnoticed in the literature for more than a decade. But recently, quite a number of semanticists have discussed his theory. Every alternative account contains one or other material modification of Sæbø’s theory. Our proposal will be this. The inner antecedent is not added to the ordering source. It rather is the antecedent of a Lewisonian necessity-conditional. Equivalently, it can be added to a circumstantial modal base that contains all the facts compatible with the antecedent. Furthermore, the construction is analyzed as a conditional speech act: the sentence expresses an assertion in a context in which you want to go to Harlem. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 2 we will have a closer look at the data, section 3 will be a review of the literature on ACs and in section 4 we will present a counterfactual account.