The syntax and semantics of implicit conditionals: Filling in the antecedent.

摘要

This thesis is a study of a particular type of conditional construction, which I name the Implicit Conditional construction, or IC. An IC is a subjunctive conditional sentence which has no overt antecedent; a canonical example is John would hate Paris where the full conditional counterpart would be If he went there, John would hate Paris. The thesis proposes a syntactic analysis of the construction, and a semantic interpretation for the syntactic structure I propose.;I focus on a particular challenge that the IC construction presents, namely that the construction is construed as a conditional, even though the overt material provides what looks like the consequent of a full conditional but lacks a correspondent to the antecedent to a full conditional.;More specifically, I focus on cases, such as John would kick a unicorn, where the interpretation seems to require that part of the overt structure itself, a unicorn in this case, is interpreted as part of the understood antecedent. As a solution to this dilemma, I propose that for these ICs the LF, the syntactic level which feeds semantic interpretation, differs from what is obvious from the overt material, in that a covert copying operation takes place which provides two copies of the noun phrase, one in the understood antecedent and the other in the understood consequent.;In addition to these basic issues, there are other problems which arise in specific cases of ICs. In some cases these are already predicted by the theory I propose for the basic readings; in other cases I propose extensions to capture the data. However, these extensions follow naturally from commonly assumed constraints on syntactic derivations, and I suggest that they have positive implications for linguistic theory as a whole.