The Italian Conditional: X-Marking and Beyond

Abstract

Languages often use the same morphology (‘X-marking’ morphology, von Fintel and Iatridou 2023) to express counterfactual conditionals, wishes and weak necessity. We bring into the arena a use of X-marking, the reportative interpretation of the Italian conditional, which has received little attention in the formal semantics literature (but see Howell 2012 on the French conditionnel). We show that, on its reportative use, the Italian conditional patterns with reportative evidentials cross-linguistically. We propose that the reportative reading arises when conditional morphology interacts with a default assertoric modal operator, and performs two operations argued to be at work in other uses of X-marking: modal domain widening (as in counterfactual conditionals, von Fintel and Iatridou 2023) and modal domain restriction (as in weak necessity modals, von Fintel and Iatridou 2008).