Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

On the grammar of conditionals: reply to Barker

On the grammar of conditionals: reply to Barker V. H. Dudman Grammatical proposals of mine for conditionals have been challenged by Stephen Barker (1996). I thank him, both for his critical attention and because, in the confrontation, I seem to have devised an astonishingly swift demonstration that conditionals can have neither ‘antecedents’ nor ‘conse- quents’ (§8). Particularized to a single example, our bone of contention is how the italicized string is to be parsed when (A) occurs under its conditional inter- pretation m : (A) If she had been at the garden party, Grannie would have been drunk. Barker, who calls it a C-string, has it encoding its own message (215), half the doctrine I am bursting to refute. Whereas I maintain that this string is merely an integral part of a subordinate clause – more particularly a condi- tional clause – ‘If she had been at the garden party’, which works as a unit encoding an informational factor c which neither is nor incorporates a message. I call c a complication. Barker’s wider analysis has conditionals outwardly binary, with the conditional clause encoding something external to what the rest of the sentence encodes (215), and this, I shall argue, is obviously the correct appreciation. Having hitherto http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Analysis Oxford University Press

On the grammar of conditionals: reply to Barker

Analysis , Volume 58 (4) – Oct 1, 1998

Loading next page...
 
/lp/oxford-university-press/on-the-grammar-of-conditionals-reply-to-barker-lROAVnLMs0

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© Published by Oxford University Press.
ISSN
0003-2638
eISSN
1467-8284
DOI
10.1093/analys/58.4.277
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

V. H. Dudman Grammatical proposals of mine for conditionals have been challenged by Stephen Barker (1996). I thank him, both for his critical attention and because, in the confrontation, I seem to have devised an astonishingly swift demonstration that conditionals can have neither ‘antecedents’ nor ‘conse- quents’ (§8). Particularized to a single example, our bone of contention is how the italicized string is to be parsed when (A) occurs under its conditional inter- pretation m : (A) If she had been at the garden party, Grannie would have been drunk. Barker, who calls it a C-string, has it encoding its own message (215), half the doctrine I am bursting to refute. Whereas I maintain that this string is merely an integral part of a subordinate clause – more particularly a condi- tional clause – ‘If she had been at the garden party’, which works as a unit encoding an informational factor c which neither is nor incorporates a message. I call c a complication. Barker’s wider analysis has conditionals outwardly binary, with the conditional clause encoding something external to what the rest of the sentence encodes (215), and this, I shall argue, is obviously the correct appreciation. Having hitherto

Journal

AnalysisOxford University Press

Published: Oct 1, 1998

There are no references for this article.