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Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals
No full textSince Sæbø (1985, 2001) drew the attention of formal semanticists to the compositionality problems raised by anankastic conditionals like "If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train", a number of authors have proposed analyses tailor-made for such conditionals. We demonstrate that the seemingly puzzling properties of anankastic conditionals in fact show up independently from each other within a wider range of conditionals, which we call ‘near-anankastic’. While they do not have the means-of implication typically associated with anankastics, near-anankastics give rise to their own special additional implications. As a crucial ingredient for a unified account, we provide a new analysis of the semantics of the desire predicate in the antecedent — an issue that has not been adequately pursued in the previous literature. We claim that want has an independently motivated reading on which it predicates the existence of an action-relevant preference (Condoravdi & Lauer 2011, 2012, Lauer 2013). We then show that the semantically determined interpretation of anankastic and near-anankastic conditionals arises, predictably and compositionally, from a range of interacting factors that are at play in the interpretation of conditional sentences more generally. The special implications associated with each kind of conditional arise pragmatically. Anankastic and near-anankastic conditionals alike turn out to be just what they seem: regular, hypothetical, indicative conditionals.publishe
Performative Verbs and Performative Acts
Get PDFSearle (1989) posits a set of adequacy criteria for any account of the meaning and use of performative verbs, such as order or promise. Central among them are: (a) performative utterances are performances of the act named by the performative verb; (b) performative utterances are self-verifying; (c) performative utterances achieve (a) and (b) in virtue of their literal meaning. He then argues that the fundamental problem with assertoric accounts of performatives is that they fail (b), and hence (a), because being committed to having an intention does not guarantee having that intention. Relying on a uniform meaning for verbs on their reportative and performative uses, we propose an assertoric analysis of performative utterances that does not require an actual intention for deriving (b), and hence can meet (a) and (c)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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