ErgSemantics_Conditionals

ESD Test Suite Examples

If Abrams arrived, Browne arrived.
Had Abrams arrived, Browne would have barked.

Linguistic Characterization

Complex sentences consisting of a main clause modified by a subordinate clause include conditional expressions where the modifying clause provides the semantics of the antecedent and the main clause is the consequent. One of the two primary syntactic variants for this construction introduces the dependent clause with the subordinating conjunction if, while in the other variant, the dependent clause exhibits the subject-auxiliary inversion used in yes-no questions, but with a constrained inventory of permissible auxiliary verbs in subjunctive mood. The only auxiliaries found in this construction are had, were, should, and might. In both variants, the dependent clause can appear either before or after the main clause, and the main clause can be optionally modified by an overt then adverb. In the variant introduced by if, the head verb of the dependent clause can be in either indicative or subjunctive mood.

Motivating Examples

• Subjunctive mood in both clauses: If the dog were angry, it would bark.

• Indicative mood in both clauses: If the dog is angry, it barks.

• if-clause order variation: The dog would bark if it were angry.

• Inverted clause order: The dog would bark, were it angry.

MRS Fingerprints

The two-place relation takes the top handle of the main clause as its first argument, and that of the dependent clause as its second, in both instances mediated by a qeq relation to permit quantifiers to scope inside or outside.

h0:_if_x_then(ARG1 h1, ARG2 h2)
_(LBL h3)
_(LBL h4)

{ h1 =q h3, h2 =q h4 }

Interactions

* In the inverted clause variant, negation of the auxiliary verb is not possible: *Hadn't the dog been angry, it would not have barked. * The subjunctive form of the syntactic head verb in the dependent clause (in both variants) is the morphological past-tense form, though the semantics of the verb is not constrained to be in the past.

Open Questions

Grammar Version

• 1212

More Information

• ErgSemantics main page

• Inventory of semantic phenomena (to be) documented

• How to cite this work