What to Do If You Want to Go to Harlem: Anankastic Conditionals and Related Matters∗

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Fintel, Kai Von Iatridou, Sabine
Copyright Year	2005
Abstract	At first glance, this is an entirely unremarkable kind of sentence. It is easy to find naturally occuring exponents. Its meaning is also clear: taking the A train is a necessary condition for going to Harlem. Hence the term “anankastic conditional”, Ananke being the Greek protogonos of inevitability, compulsion and necessity. What turns out to be quite a puzzle, however, is how the meaning of the Harlem Sentence arises compositionally from its ingredients, in particular if, want, and have to. We will see that moving towards a solution to this problem will open up some fundamental issues in the compositional semantics of modals and conditionals. In the recent semantic literature, it was Saebo [11], who brought this puzzle to our attention, but otherwise this kind of sentence has been neglected. Saebo found a relevant passage by von Wright [15]:
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Alternate Webpage(s)	http://mit.edu/fintel/www/harlem-rutgers.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2005-harlem.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/harlem.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://mit.edu/fintel/www/harlem.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2005-harlem-rutgers.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article