A pragmatic solution to anankastic conditionals

Abstract

Standard accounts of modals and conditionals fail to derive the correct meaning of anankastic conditionals like ‘If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train’, where it seems as if the modal in the consequent is restricted by the embedded complement of want (you go to Harlem), rather than by the whole antecedent (you want to go to Harlem). This has led to proposals for a special semantics for want (Condoravdi and Lauer, 2016) or a covert purpose clause associated with teleological (goal-oriented) modality (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2005). In this paper, we show that the apparent non-compositionality of anankastic conditionals is more general, and can be replicated with other modal flavors and attitude verbs: all can trigger what we call “harmonizing readings”. We offer a pragmatic account that generalizes across modal flavors and attitudes. Specifically, we argue that harmonizing arises when the meaning of the antecedent together with background assumptions gives rise to a modal inference that matches in flavor with the consequent modal. Our account predicts when harmonizing is possible and when it isn’t, without relying on any lexical or syntactic idiosyncrasies.