Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

194 Presuppositions and Pronouns
6.4 Conditionals
In his paper on quantificational adverbs, Lewis (1975) argues that in
examples like the following,
( always ~\
(40) a. If a farmer owns a donkey, he {so~:~:es < sometimes } V beats it. it.
[ usually
J
Always "j
b. { S!;t~;:es Sometimes } >, , if a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it.
Usually
J
the if-clause //"-clause serves to restrict the domain of the adverb, which he analyses as
an unselective quantifier. Lewis observes that there may be any number of ifclauses
in constructions like these, and that the number may be zero, in which
if-
case (40a) and (40b) collapse into:
always }
(41) A farmer { so~:~:es sometimes } V beats his donkey. donkey,
usually
J
Here the domain which the adverb quantifies over remains implicit. On the
other hand, Lewis notes, ordinary conditionals may be construed as
containing a covert adverb of quantification. For example,
(42) If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it.
is to be treated just like the examples in (40), but with an implicit always. It
is this view on conditionals which lies at the heart of DRT.
Building on Lewis's work, Kratzer (1979, 1981, 1991) proposes a related
analysis of conditionals.
(43) If a murder occurs, the jurors must convene. (Kratzer 1991: 648)
Instead of analysing (43) in terms of a binary connective, Kratzer proposes
that the if-clause //"-clause serves to restrict the domain of must. Thus she construes
(43), in effect, as 'The jurors must convene', on the understanding that the
modal domain is restricted to worlds in which the antecedent of (43) is true.
Kratzer extends this analysis to ordinary conditionals without overt modals,
like:
(44) If a murder occurs, the jurors convene. (Kratzer 1991: 649)
which she claims contains a covert necessity operator. The resulting theory is
a generalization of the theory of conditionals pioneered by Stalnaker (1968,
1975) and Lewis (1973).