Thanks are due to the Institute of the Czech National Corpus and to the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences which kindly provided the data source for this paper. I also wish to thank Denisa Lenertová and the audiences of the Potsdam Workshop on Heterogenity in Linguistic Databases and of the 13th JungslavistInnen-Treffen for discussion, and the editors for their frie...

The claim that zombies are conceivable is a premise of one of the most important anti-physicalist arguments. Eric Marcus (2004) challenges that premise in two novel ways. He observes that conceiving of zombies would require imagining total subjective absence. And this, he argues, we cannot do. However, his argument turns on the assumption that absence is imaginable only against a background of ...

In Counterfactuals, David Lewis noticed that definite descriptions and conditionals display the same kind of non-monotonic behavior. We take his observation literally and suggest that if-clauses are, quite simply, definite descriptions of possible worlds (related ideas are developed in Bittner 2001). We depart from Lewis's analysis, however, in claiming that if-clauses, like Strawsonian definit...