Modals, Conditionals and Compositionality

Abstract

This dissertation concerns three compositionality puzzles in the semantics of modality and conditionals. In particular, we will discuss modal concord, anankastic conditionals, and domain restricting if-clauses. Existing analyses of these phenomena, if compositional at all, achieve compositionality by fiddling with what the meaningful parts of the relevant constructions are. The present study improves on these analyses by reconciling compositionality with the assumption that all constituents involved are meaningful. I argue that for each puzzle the trick is to find the right semantics for the constituents involved