On the licensing of argument conditionals

Abstract

The paper focusses on the syntactic and semantic licensing conditions of constructions like Max akzeptiert es, wenn Lea Geige spielt. ‘Max accepts it if Lea plays the violin’. The clause introduced by wenn ‘if’ has a double function in that it is an adverbial that provides the protasis of an implication as well as the propositional argument of a matrix predicate. The paper argues against Pullum [15], Pesetsky [14], and Hinterwimmer [8], suggesting that the conditional conjunction wenn encodes two implication types: the classic type: if p is contingent and true, then q(p) and the preference type: if p is contingent, then q(p). Additionally, the paper focusses on the characteristic properties of the matrix predicates that license argument conditionals.