TY - GEN

T1 - "Appositional" and "Co-determinative" conditional clauses

AU - Tiskin, D. B.

PY - 2016/1/1

Y1 - 2016/1/1

N2 - Th? paper provides evidence for the claim that the Russian conditional conjunction esli 'if' is itself devoid of either conditional or determiner semantics. The argument proceeds as follows. I demonstrate that with conjoined conditionals, just like with some NPs/DPs and with free relatives, one gets not only the immediately obvious "parallel" reading ('for A and for B') but also the "co-determinative" reading ('for those A which are also B'). The sort of reading identified in the literature as "appositional" turns out to be a subclass of co-determinative readings. It has been proposed that appositional readings for NPs/DPs result from the fact that the pertinent DPs denote properties, whereas their conversion into referring or quantificational expressions is performed by typeshifting rules. Applying the same technique to conditionals, I conclude that the conditional esli cannot have the semantics of the definite determiner in the domain of possible worlds. Given the influential view (Lewis etc.) that if does not quantify over worlds either (that work done rather by "adverbs of quantification", which may be overt, e. g. always or usually, or covert), esli ends up free from any semantic duty, except that - as I argue - it determines whether the quantification over worlds or over time instances takes place (cf. esli vs. kogda 'when'). The proposed analysis may be used as guidance for the development of automatic recognition and analysis rules for such constructions.

AB - Th? paper provides evidence for the claim that the Russian conditional conjunction esli 'if' is itself devoid of either conditional or determiner semantics. The argument proceeds as follows. I demonstrate that with conjoined conditionals, just like with some NPs/DPs and with free relatives, one gets not only the immediately obvious "parallel" reading ('for A and for B') but also the "co-determinative" reading ('for those A which are also B'). The sort of reading identified in the literature as "appositional" turns out to be a subclass of co-determinative readings. It has been proposed that appositional readings for NPs/DPs result from the fact that the pertinent DPs denote properties, whereas their conversion into referring or quantificational expressions is performed by typeshifting rules. Applying the same technique to conditionals, I conclude that the conditional esli cannot have the semantics of the definite determiner in the domain of possible worlds. Given the influential view (Lewis etc.) that if does not quantify over worlds either (that work done rather by "adverbs of quantification", which may be overt, e. g. always or usually, or covert), esli ends up free from any semantic duty, except that - as I argue - it determines whether the quantification over worlds or over time instances takes place (cf. esli vs. kogda 'when'). The proposed analysis may be used as guidance for the development of automatic recognition and analysis rules for such constructions.

KW - Compound sentences

KW - Conditional clauses

KW - Conjunction

KW - DP

KW - Free relatives

KW - NP

KW - Type shift

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85020431874&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - статья в сборнике материалов конференции

AN - SCOPUS:85020431874

T3 - Komp'juternaja Lingvistika i Intellektual'nye Tehnologii

SP - 756

EP - 768

BT - International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, Dialogue 2016

Y2 - 1 June 2016 through 4 June 2016

ER -