Arnim von Stechow, Sveta Krasikova, & Doris Penka. “Anankastic Conditionals”. ms.

We propose a new analysis for anankastic conditionals, which are exemplified by the following pattern due to Kjell-Johan Sæbø

a. You have to take the A train if you want to go to Harlem.
b. If you don’t take the A train you can’t go to Harlem.
c. To go to Harlem you have to take the A train.

All these are claimed to be truth conditionally equivalent. The hardest problem is a compositional analysis of (a): what is the role played by “want” in the antecedent? Our proposal starts from the observation that (a) is elliptical. Its overt forms is (a’):

a’. If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train to go to Harlem.

The consequent in (a’) contains no “want” and is in fact (c). We propose a counterfactual analysis for (c): the sentence is true if you take the A train in the nearest worlds where you go to Harlem. The want-antecedent in (a) adds a felicity condtion: the sentence can be uttered appropriately only in contexts whose conversational background is compatible with the proposition that you want to go to Harlem. As far as we can see, this analysis solves all the problems that have been discussed in the literature about anankastic conditionals.

The draft contains some responses to the paper on the same topic that I wrote with Sabine Iatridou and to Janneke Huitink’s recent talk on the topic. I suppose it really is time for us to revisit the topic and to respond to this new work.