This paper examines how moods are used in declarative conditionals. Contrary to what is usually defended in the literature, the divide between indicative and subjunctive is unable to account for all the possible cases present in natural language. Therefore, the analysis goes down to the level of the antecedent and the consequent in order to examine their local and global interactions with moods. A formal semantics split into two layers is presented in order to model all the possible cases. The l…
Read moreThis paper examines how moods are used in declarative conditionals. Contrary to what is usually defended in the literature, the divide between indicative and subjunctive is unable to account for all the possible cases present in natural language. Therefore, the analysis goes down to the level of the antecedent and the consequent in order to examine their local and global interactions with moods. A formal semantics split into two layers is presented in order to model all the possible cases. The lower layer is the semantics of the conditional and the upper layer is the semantics for the indicative, subjunctive and conditional moods. Finally, it is shown that this proposal provides a unified solution to three puzzles: the Oswald-Kennedy example, the direct argument and the Gibbardian stand-offs. © 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
