This past weekend, I was at the Conditionals Conference at UConn, which was lots of fun. I was one of two linguists on the program (Stefan Kaufmann was the other). Instead of talking about my current research paper on conditionals (the Harlem paper), I decided to give a more expository talk about how many linguists view conditionals, namely through the lens of the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim analysis that sees if-clauses as restrictors for modal operators. After introducing that view and Angelika’s conjecture that indicative conditionals, at least those of a particular sort, involve covert epistemic modality, I proceeded to defend that view against the rather mainstream view among philosophers that indicatives do not express propositions, do not have truth-conditions.
I got lots of good feedback and encouragement, which will be helpful when I write this stuff up for the book on conditionals that I am supposedly developing for Oxford’s new “Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics” series.
For the time being, the slides and some selected references are online.
Good to hear that more will come from you for us to read. Whenever I have the opportunity, I recommend your works to both linguists and professionals in other related areas, namely Philosophers, Cognitive Scientists, etc.
April 12th, 2006, at 1:05 am #By the way, I have posted two papers related to the subject above in my blog that might interest you.