Linguistic Circle

Speaker: Dan Lassiter (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Suppositional devices and their domain-restricting effects

Abstract: English and many other languages boast a variety of ways to introduce temporary assumptions or "suppositions" into a discourse. The best-known are adverbial clauses headed by if and unless, but we also have constructional devices such as aux-fronting, discourse adverbials such as otherwise, various participial constructions, simple juxtaposition, and certain uses of and and or, among others. It is well-known that if-clauses can restrict the domains of modals, generics, adverbs of quantification, and certain other operators. However, it has not (to my knowledge) been previously noted that other suppositional devices have similar domain-restricting effects. The first part of this talk documents these patterns and proposes that suppositional devices always restrict the domains of these operators. The second part draws out the theoretical consequences of this putative universal. Domain restriction is not just problematic for traditional theories of if as a sentential connective: it is also very awkward for the alternative account of if-clauses as a pure devices of domain restriction (Lewis 1975, Kratzer 1981 et seq). I argue that domain restriction is not a lexical property of if or any other suppositional device, but is instead an inevitable by-product of the discourse meaning of a supposition: temporary assumptions restrict the context within their scope, affecting all expressions whose domains are anchored to the context. This theory correctly predicts several systematic gaps in the domain-restricting behavior of if and other devices, including the much-discussed fact that they cannot restrict nominal quantifiers.

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