In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (orwould) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints onthe satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphologyin both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctiveconditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate thismeaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines ofresearch on conditionals. Ippolito's proposal will be of interest both to linguists and tophilosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally.
Ippolitoreviews previous analyses of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals in the work of DavidLewis, Robert Stalnaker, Angelika Kratzer, and others; considers the contrast between future simplepast subjunctive conditionals and future past perfect subjunctive conditionals; presents a proposalfor subjunctive conditionals that addresses puzzles left unsolved by previous proposals; reviews anumber of presupposition triggers showing that they fit the pattern predicted by her proposal; anddiscusses an asymmetry between the past and the future among subjunctive conditionals, arguing thatthe best account of our linguistic intuitions must include an indeterministic view of theworld.
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