Modal Aspects of Before

Publication
Oct 23, 2011
[Work published prior to Yahoo]
Abstract

A main characteristic of the sentential complementizer before is that it allows a false statement to act as its subordinate clause (when described as A before B, this would be the B-clause). Such an instance of its use, as in (1), is called a nonveridical. (1) Mozart died before he finished the Requiem. In other cases, though, merely having a false B-clause does not make a sound sentence. A sentence like “David ate lots of ketchup before winning all medals in the Olympics” rings bad to English speakers. Condoravdi & Beaver (2003), along with some following work, attempt to capture both these facts within a possible-worlds-based account. Under their conditions, a before-sentence is true if at the time the A-clause occurred in our world precedes any times where the B-clause occurred in alternative worlds which “branch out” of ours at a minimal time preceding the A-occurrence of our world. If no B-occurrences exist in the alternative set of worlds, the sentence is judged to have no truth value, thus accommodating the “ketchup sentence”. This work claims that this analysis leads to undesirable consequences. By systematically going over its truth conditions when calculated for sentence (1), I prove that if we judge worlds where Mozart managed to work faster and finished the Requiem early are close enough to ours, which I claim they are, then Beaver & Condoravdi (2003) & followers’ account leads to a false prediction. Next I offer my analysis – by reverting to earlier truth conditions for before-sentences and adding a felicity constraint which captures both veridicals and non-veridicals, we arrive at the desired results. I then turn to a subclass of nonveridical sentences where interesting phenomena occur. A fine-grained scale of situations are constructed, different by the degree to which the B-clause has been considered a possibility if the A-clause, always an interruption to the completion of B, had not happened in the way it did in our world (defined as Hypothetic Possibility). As a means of dealing with this richer scale I devise an expansion of the common notion of acceptability: Operator-Affected Acceptability. It is the result of calculating the basic felicities of the sentence and a version of the sentence with a sentential operator (in this case, the modal could). The main result of this chapter is that the notions of Hypothetic Possibility and Could-Affected Acceptability are positively correlated: as one grows, so does the other.

  • IGDAL 1, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Conference/Workshop Paper

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