Dr. Kyle Rawlins
The vast majority of work on the meanings of conditionals centers around sentences with "if"-clause adjuncts: (1) If you make a Mediterranean salad or a spinach salad, you should put feta cheese on it. Despite this, there are a wide range of conditional-like structures that do not pattern with English "if"-conditionals syntactically, or semantically. I show how to generalize a semantic analysis of "if"- conditionals to handle "if"-less conditionals, examining a class of "if"-less conditional, called unconditionals, as a case study: (2) Whether you make a Mediterranean salad or a spinach salad, you should put feta cheese on it.
(3) Whatever salad you make, you should put feta cheese on it.
(4) No matter what salad you make, you should put feta cheese on it. Each of these unconditional constructions can be given a compositional analysis that is uniform with "if"-conditionals. The common denominator is that any conditional adjunct serves to provide a contextual restriction to the domain of an operator in its scope, such as the modal "should" in the above examples. The differences in meaning between (1-4) follow entirely from differences in the internal structure of the adjunct. "If"-clause adjuncts pattern with straightforward declarative clauses in meaning, whereas unconditional
adjuncts pattern with the interrogative clauses in meaning.
Consequently, I will also develop a semantics for the kinds of questions involved, namely alternative and "-ever" questions.
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