Real Conditionals

Logicians have written a great deal on the semantics of conditional sentences. This book contends that insufficient attention has been paid to the syntax of conditionals as investigated by linguists. Syntactic data are used to make the case that If-clauses tacitly quantify over items called events circumstances or conditions. This motivates a semantic theory of conditionals that concentrates on only if even if and unless as well as on If...then. The theory is then applied to a number of examples from the literature and its predictions and successes compare favorably to those of competing semantic theories.