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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on March 6, 2007
Journal of Semantics 2007 24(2):93-129; doi:10.1093/jos/ffl013
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Were, Would, Might and a Compositional Account of Counterfactuals

Nicholas Asher

The University of Texas at Austin

Eric McCready

Aoyama Gakuin University

Correspondence: ERIC MCCREADY, Department of English, Aoyama Gakuin University, 4-4-25 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-8366, mccready{at}cl.aoyama.ac.jp


  Abstract

This paper has two purposes. We first give a new dynamic account of epistemic modal operators that account for both their test-like behaviour with respect to whole information states and their capacity to induce quantificational dependencies across worlds (modal subordination). We then use this theory, together with an analysis of conditionals and irrealis moods, to give a fully compositional semantics of indicative and counterfactual conditionals. In our analysis, the distinction between counterfactual and indicative conditionals follows directly from the interaction between the semantics of the conditional and irrealis operators and the semantics of the particular modals involved in the conditional consequent. We indicate some theoretical and logical consequences of our approach.

Received for publication 21 November 2005. Revision received 4 April 2006. Accepted for publication 20 November 2006.


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