User Settings
Book Chapter10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199678860.003.0007

Compositionality and change in conditionals and counterfactuals in Romance⋆

Nigel Vincent-2013-08-29-Oxford University Press eBooks
28

TL;DRAbstract

Abstract This chapter offers a survey of the historical developments of the Romance conditional forms deriving from the combination of the Latin infinitive with the imperfect or the perfect of the verb habere ‘have’. It shows how these developments fit well with the general semantics for hypotheticals and counterfactuals developed by Iatridou (2000), and argues that the compositionality that lies at the heart of Iatridou’s approach survives for the most part in the modern languages despite changes in the surface syntactic and morphological realization of these meanings and despite the development of new uses for the conditional. Even so, there are special circumstances in which this compositionality breaks down, and two such cases—the conditional surcomposé in French and old Neapolitan and the role of the compound conditional in indirect speech in Italian—are considered. Finally, the chapter discusses the relation of compositionality to the concept of the morphome.

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper

Abstract This chapter offers a survey of the historical developments of the Romance conditional forms deriving from the combination of the Latin infinitive with the imperfect or the perfect of the verb habere ‘have’. It shows how these developments fit well with the general semantics for hypotheticals and counterfactuals developed by Iatridou (2000), and argues that the compositionality that lies at the heart of Iatridou’s approach survives for the most part in the modern languages despite changes in the surface syntactic and morphological realization of these meanings and despite the development of new uses for the conditional. Even so, there are special circumstances in which this compositionality breaks down, and two such cases—the conditional surcomposé in French and old Neapolitan and the role of the compound conditional in indirect speech in Italian—are considered. Finally, the chapter discusses the relation of compositionality to the concept of the morphome.

Keywords

Counterfactual conditionalPrinciple of compositionalityRomanceLinguisticsMathematicsPsychologyPhilosophyEpistemology

Chat

Click to start Chat