Magdalena Kaufmann will be talking at the Linguistics colloquium at MIT on Friday, October 14, 2022.

How to be impossible or remote

Natural languages mark so-called subjunctive conditionals that allow speakers to specify consequences of states of affairs they present as unlikely or counterfactual. Different morphosyntactic strategies within and across languages show what often seem to be idiosyncratic interactions between temporal and modal information. Building on in-depth studies of individual languages and more fine-grained distinctions between types of hypotheticality, the recent literature sees a trend towards a distinction between unrealized past possibilities and co-temporal counterfactual states of affairs.

In this talk, I draw on novel data from Serbian (joint work with Neda Todorovic) and German in comparison to English and Japanese (joint work with Stefan Kaufmann), to support this idea and develop a compositional analysis.

Stefan Kaufmann will speak as part of a forum at the Converging on Causal Ontology Analysis (COCOA) zoominar on Wednesday, October 12, 2022.

Was I speaking before I spoke?

Some English expressions let us characterize states of affairs in terms of subsequent courses of events, even if the latter do not come to pass. Well-known examples of this are “counterfactual” before-clauses (‘The police defused the bomb before it exploded’) and progressives (‘Mary was drawing a circle when she ran out of ink’). Numerous proposals have been made to capture the modal component of each of these constructions, such as Beaver and Condoravdi (2003) for before and Landman (1992) for the progressive. Both refer to possible worlds and processes or events, but ultimately rely on notions that are less well understood (reasonably probable worlds; continuation branches of events). The connection to conditionals (‘If the police hadn’t defused the bomb, it would have exploded’; ‘If she hadn’t run out of ink, she would have drawn a circle’) looms large but is not explored in detail.

Assuming that causal models are a useful tool for modeling (the relevant kind of) counterfactual reasoning, what might they tell us about the relationship between before-clauses, progressives and counterfactual conditionals? Are events crucially involved, and if so, how should they be represented in the causal model? A close look at all three constructions reveals striking similarities, but also stark differences. The similarities suggest to me that pretty much the same kind of causal reasoning is involved in before-clauses and progressives. The differences suggest that the notion of “event” that figures in the analysis of the progressive is not as useful in before-clauses. It turns out that the causal structure is useful precisely for abstracting away from other particulars of the events.

Magdalena Kaufmann gave an invited talk, titled “Conjoining(,) conditionals and coherence relations”, in response to Una Stojnić’s book “Context and Coherence”, at the annual “Philosophy of Language and Linguistics” conference which took place September 5-9, 2022 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Stefan Kaufmann’s paper “Bernoulli Semantics and Ordinal Semantics for conditionals” has been published in the Journal of Philosophical Logic.

Muyi Yang’s paper “Iffy discourse: Japanese moshi in conditionals and nominal topics” has been published in the Linguistics Vanguard.

Magda Kaufmann will give a talk titled A compositional take on directive microvariation at the SPAGAD Lecture Series, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany, on July 1, 2022. The talk will be online.

We will be teaching at the summer school Conditionals 2022 (école thématique CNRS), held at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris, France, June 13-17, 2022:

• Magdalena Kaufmann: Conditionals without if – tracking conditional meaning across languages
• Stefan Kaufmann: Logical properties and linguistic expression of conditional meaning

SALT 32 (June 8-10, Mexico City) will feature two appearances by our team:

• Yang, Muyi. Singularity and plurality of discourse reference to worlds. (Presentation.)
• Mizuno, Teruyuki and Stefan Kaufmann. Past-as-Past in counterfactual desire reports: a view from Japanese. (Poster.)

Stefan Kaufmann will give a talk on his paper “How Fake is Fake Past?” in the “Construction of Meaning” series at Stanford University on May 19, 2022. The talk will be online.

Stefan Kaufmann has been named a faculty fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) for 2022-2023 to work on the project “What was, what will be, and what would have been”.