The semantic anatomy of conditional sentences

This paper offers a compositional semantics for English conditional sentences. The proposal is worked out within the GB/Minimalist approach to the syntax/semantics interface and uses for the interpretation Plural Compositional DRT as introduced by Brasoveanu [2008]. The approach is based on the idea of Bhatt and Pancheva [2006] (among others) that if-clauses are free relatives of possible worlds, and, consequently, that they have to be treated as referential expressions. The approach is well related to the philosophical literature on conditionals in that it incorporates the similarity approach to conditionals of Lewis [1973] and Stalnaker [1968]. It is also agrees with the central claims of the restrictor approach of Kratzer [1979, 1991]. In contrast to the standard spell-out of the latter the present approach does not need a covert modal operator at the level of LF to account for bare conditionals.