Conditionals

We present a puzzle about knowledge, probability and conditionals. We show that in certain cases some basic and plausible principles governing our reasoning come into conflict. In particular, we show that there is a simple argument that a person may be in a position to know a conditional the consequent of which has a low probability conditional on its antecedent, contra Adams' thesis. We suggest that the puzzle motivates a very strong restriction on the inference of a conditional from a disjunction.

In addressing a question at the semantics-pragmatics interface of how conditionals in English should be categorised, this paper addresses the underlying question: what is a conditional?  Conditionals in English are very often associated with the canonical pattern ‘if p then q’.  But while the word 'if' provides a simple function to aid us in expressing our conditional thought, it goes without saying that conditional thought does not go hand in hand with the single word 'if'.  This paper explores some of the ways that conditionals may be expressed in English without using 'if' by presenting observations obtained from the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) combined with results from previous empirical studies (e.g. Declerck & Reed 2001).  In doing so, this paper considers the question what exactly it is to be a conditional, proposing some criteria to guide the categorisation of conditional expressions.  In turn, this paper aims to shed some light as to why conditionals using 'if' are so often focussed upon.

Every adequate semantics for conditionals and deontic "ought" must offer a solution to the miners paradox about conditional obligations. Kolodny and MacFarlane have recently argued that such a semantics must reject the validity of modus ponens. I demonstrate that rejecting the validity of modus ponens is inessential for an adequate solution to the paradox

This article presents the history of the Latvian disjunctive conjunction jeb ‘or’ and analyzes its relationship with OLith. jeib ‘if’. Jeb as a disjunctive conjunction is a result of strictly Latvian development and originates from the concessive conditionals with two counterconditions in the protasis.

An intriguing characteristic of conditionals is that they are modally dense constructions, without being modal markers themselves. This chapter will examine the modal nature of conditionals through the lens of construction grammar. It will be argued that the main utility of conditionals does not lie in pairing conditions with consequents, nor in establishing the factuality or actualisation of conditions and consequents, but in leaving issues of factuality or actualisation unresolved. The chapter proposes that conditional constructions are better regarded as environments of indeterminacy, in that they modalise what is communicated through them. More precisely it will be argued that conditionals can be usefully treated as the linguistic equivalent of quantum bits (qubits). The chapter will also discuss the characteristics that define the family of conditional constructions, and those differentiating between family members.

People often reason about states of the world that could have been, but which are not, or those which could be, given that certain conditions are satisfied. When we make statements about such relationships, we usually divide them into two parts: the condition (protasis) and the result (the apodosis). While most languages signal the relationship between protasis and apodosis in counterfactual conditional constructions explicitly, they vary widely in the structures they use to do so. The present study addresses several questions related to cross-linguistic variation in this domain. How are the clauses marked for tense, aspect, and modality? What kind of clause-linking strategies are used to combine them? Are the clauses marked using the same or different morphosyntax? Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of a large sample of carefully selected languages, we demonstrate widespread differences between languages. We also uncover general patterns of features that correlate both with the symmetry and the morphosyntax of protases and apodoses in counterfactual conditionals across languages.

The present comparison of conditional clauses in English and Nor-
wegian is based on material from the English–Norwegian Parallel
Corpus. The conditionals are studied with respect to their form,
meaning and placement. A cross-linguistic comparison of origi-
nal texts uncovers much similarity between the languages as re-
gards properties of conditionals, but certain frequency differences
as regards syntactic and semantic choices; briefly, Norwegian has
more sentence-final conditionals than English, and also a higher
proportion of open conditionals. The analogous resources for ex-
pressing conditionals cause translations to be very similar to the
source texts, with a low proportion of non-congruent correspon-
dences in both directions of translation. Similarly, the placement
of conditionals is to a great extent preserved in translation, thus
neutralizing the differences in positional preference found in the
cross-linguistic comparison. This highlights the advantage of bidi-
rectional translation corpora, allowing researchers to distinguish
cross-linguistic differences from translation effects.

There is a profound, but frequently ignored relationship between logical consequence (formal implication) and material implication. The first repeats the patterns of the latter, but with a wider modal reach. It is argued that this kinship between formal and material implication simply means that they express the same kind of implication, but differ in scope. Formal implication is unrestricted material implication. This apparently innocuous observation has some significant corollaries: (1) conditionals are not connectives, but arguments; (2) the traditional examples of valid argumentative forms are metalogical principles that express the properties of logical consequence; (3) formal logic is not a useful guide to detect valid arguments in the real world; (4) it is incoherent to propose alternatives to the material implication while accepting the classical properties of formal implication; (5) some of the counter-examples to classical argumentative forms and known conditional puzzles are unsound.

In this study we examine the meaning of French 'devoir' in its conditional form (devrait) and compare its meaning with the form in the indicative present or past perfect and formulate an hypothesis about where the meaning effect of lesser epistemic certainty could come from.

An imperative conditional is a conditional in the imperative mood (by analogy with “indicative conditional”, “subjunctive conditional”). What, in general, is the meaning and the illocutionary effect of an imperative conditional? I survey four answers: the answer that imperative conditionals are commands to the effect that an indicative conditional be true; two versions of the answer that imperative conditionals express irreducibly conditional commands; and finally, the answer that imperative conditionals express a kind of hybrid speech act between command and assertion.

This paper aims to contribute to the methodological toolbox of “pedagogy-driven corpus-based research” (Gabrielatos 2006), that is, research which is situated at the intersection of language description, pedagogical lexicogrammar, and pedagogical materials evaluation (e.g. Harwood 2005; Hunston & Francis 1998; Kennedy 1992; Owen 1993). The contribution of the present paper mainly lies in proposing a method of triangulating the corpus-based evaluation of lexicogrammatical information in EFL coursebooks, by way of examining a relevant corpus sample of learner written output.

There has been a claim regarding the monosemicity or un-ambiguousness of the connective αν/an of Modern Greek (MG), as compared to its translational equivalent if in English – with the additional claim that the Greek culture is far less ambiguous than the English (Athanasiadou, 1997). In this paper, my aim is to restore the picture of the MG conditional connective αν/an, οn the basis of an examination of real data, demonstrating that, despite the existence of connectives such as ενώ, ‘while’, αφού, ‘since’, and άμα ‘if’[cond.temporal]), MG αν can function, not only as a conditional connective, but also as a concessive and adversative one, signifying factuality as well, just like its English counterpart. Moreover, I will advance the thesis that both English if and MG αν are used in contrastive and concessive contexts, as well as conditional ones, as strategic devices of rhetorical structures.

The scope of this article is Prescriptive Grammar.
Any English user may need a quick reference concerning conditionals in general. However, many users have an incorrect idea that, when we use past perfect in the if clause, it is ALWAYS incorrect to use “would or would not + base form of verb” in the main clause.
Therefore, the objective of this article is:
1. to define CONDITIONAL (IF) sentences in general and their BASICs; and
2. to correct the incorrect idea that, when we use past perfect in the if clause, it is ALWAYS incorrect to use “would or would not + base form of verb” in the main clause. We use this pattern in MIXED CONDITIONAL.
Whether we use “would/wouldn’t + have + past participle” or “would/wouldn’t + base form of verb” depends on whether the event is a Third Conditional or Mixed Conditional event.

Las denominadas oraciones condicionales concesivas hasta ahora no han sido estudiadas en judeoespañol, por lo que con esta contribución pretendemos ofrecer un primer acercamiento a dicho tema, tomando como base un corpus textual representativo del judeoespañol moderno. Después de una caracterización teórica de las oraciones en cuestión, estructuras intermedias entre las condicionales y las concesivas plenas, presentaremos los tres tipos de condicionales concesivas que se pueden distinguir. Explicaremos sus rasgos particulares y expondremos y ejemplificaremos cómo se manifestan en los textos sefardíes. Concluiremos con unos resultados relevantes para el conjunto de los ejemplos estudiados, así como con unas reflexiones sobre las condicionales concesivas en general.

Timothy Williamson has defended the claim that the semantics of the indicative 'if' is given by the material conditional. Putative counterexamples can be handled by better understanding the role played in our assessment of indicatives by a fallible cognitive heuristic, called the Suppositional Procedure. Williamson's Suppositional Conjecture has it that the Suppositional Procedure is humans' primary way of prospectively assessing conditionals. This paper raises some doubts on the Suppositional Procedure and Conjecture.

According to the truth-functional analysis of conditions, to be ‘necessary for’ and ‘sufficient for’ are converse relations. From this it follows that to be ‘necessary and sufficient for’ is a symmetric relation, that is, that if P is a necessary and sufficient condition for Q, then Q is a necessary and sufficient condition for P. This view is acknowledged to be contrary to common sense. In this paper I point out that it is also contrary to a widely accepted ontological view of conditions, according to which if P is a necessary and sufficient condition for Q, then Q is no sense a condition for P; it is a mere consequence of P.

Let's play a game. I'll describe it first at an abstract level, leaving details for later. Your job is to choose between options A and B. The options overlap in that each way of B-ing extends to two ways ⋆ and ⋆ of A-ing, and each way of A-ing is a ⋆ or ⋆ for some way of B-ing. 1 The s win you a penny, and likewise the ⋆ s. Both are as good as worthless, and worthless is the name we will know them by. All other s-the ⋆ s-win you a million dollars. The ⋆ s are the lucrative s. This leaves a lot to the imagination, of course, but we can see already that if you were to play the A/B game, A would be a better option than B. One could assign probabilities and do expected utility calculations, but none of that is really necessary. It's enough to note that A dominates B:

Conditionals that embed factive emotives in the consequent seem to present a counterexample to modus ponens. In this essay, I present the puzzle and propose a solution-one that connects in interesting ways to the role of emotion in suppositional reasoning and in our cognitive lives more generally.

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form p ∧ ♦¬p ('p, but it might be that not p') appears to be a contradiction, ♦¬p does not entail ¬p, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under-or over-correct. Some theories predict that p∧♦¬p, a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not allow substitution of logical equivalents; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan's laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a more concrete possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. Then we show how to extend our semantics to explain parallel phenomena involving probabilities and conditionals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary.

The paper investigates the use of the potential mood marker bi in conditional sentences in standard Macedonian. Its historic development exemplifies a “cyclic” process in which the language reintroduces a lost inherited feature into its grammatical system. Namely, the marker of potential mood – the indeclinable bi, which originated from the optative form of the OCS verb *byti, withdrew from the majority of Macedonian dialects in the middle ages under the onslaught of the imported conditional velle-construction (ke-constructions). However, since the second half of the 20th century the use of the potential bi is on the rise in conditional sentences in Macedonian standard. It is assumed here that this spread is prompted by the specific modal meaning of bi-constructions absent in the rival Balkan construction ke+imperfect, as well as by the influence of neighbouring Slavic languages. The temporal indeterminacy of the potential bi makes it suitable for all types of conditionals, but it seems that nowadays it is preferred to express non-past counterfactual conditions. The analysis of blog examples has confirmed our hypothesis that bi-constructions tend to formally mark the divide in expression of counterfactual conditionals along temporal lines thereby contributing to greater transparency of conditional marking in Macedonian.

This contribution deals with the various verbal morphology in the Italian counterfactual conditionals (the so-called periodo ipotetico dell'irrealtà). Starting from the inventory of all the possible combinations with the imperfetto indicativo that appear in these constructions, it will be shown that the variability of the mood and tense forms is not merely a matter of norm, but that there are clear-cut mechanisms which regulate such variability. Specifically, some peculiar combinations often marked as familiar or, simply, non-standard, are not always possible, but are depending on the actionality of the verbs (telic or atelic) being present in the protasis and/or the apodosis.