Grammar Matters

This chapter explores a number of grammatical properties that conditionals display, with one of its main goals being to show that grammatical form matters: different syntactic expressions of conditionality come with a different range of possible meanings. It also argues that we should not identify the semantic notion ‘conditionals’ with the syntactic expression if p, q. The syntactic construction if p, q is merely one of several syntactic paths that lead to a conditional semantics. The grammatical expression of conditionality determines the range of meanings possible. Overly narrowing conditional semantics to only one syntactic construction makes it harder to identify where each of the elements of meaning originates.