On the grammar of conditionals: reply to Barker

V.H. DUDMAN

    Grammatical proposals of mine for conditionals have been challenged by Stephen Barker (1996).  I thank him, both for his critical attention and because, in the confrontation, I seem to have devised an astonishingly swift demonstration that conditionals can have neither ‘antecedents’ nor ‘consequents’ (§8).

    Particularized to a single example, our bone of contention is how the italicized string is to be parsed when (A) occurs under its conditional interpretation m1:

	(A)    If she had been at the garden party, Grannie would have been drunk

Barker, who calls it a C-string, has it encoding its own message (215), half the doctrine I am bursting to refute. Whereas I maintain that this string is merely an integral part of a subordinate clause – more particularly a conditional clause – ‘If she had been at the garden party’, which works as a unit encoding an informational factor c which neither is nor incorporates a message.  I call c a complication.
    Barker’s wider analysis has conditionals outwardly binary, with the conditional clause encoding something external to what the rest of the sentence encodes (215), and this, I shall argue, is obviously the correct appreciation.  Having hitherto proclaimed now one contrary guess and now another, I hasten to revise my account of nothing less than the outermost structure of conditionals (§6).
    That a sentence is precisely a string  that encodes a message we can take as common ground.  Actually, Barker says ‘expresses a thought’ (211n), but since he represents me as saying that too (e.g. 211, 214), it should come for him to the same thing.  In these terms, his position is that when (A) occurs under m1, its C-string is parsed as a sentence.  My submissions to the contrary are ‘flawed’, as resting on ‘a highly dubious criterion of sentencehood’ (210).  Now read on.

1.  In 1984 I explained ‘parsed as a sentence’ as ‘understood exactly as if standing alone between full stops’ (145).  Presumably this – he gives no exact reference – is my highly dubious criterion.  Certainly it has the abhorred consequence that ‘if’-sentences under conditional interpretations have their C-strings parsed not as sentences.
  It will be evident that my 1984 doctrine entails the principle – call it P – that

	a string can encode a message m in a wider context only if it can encode that 	same message m when standing alone.

But Barker characterizes it as saying ‘in effect’ that

	if a string encodes a message m in a wider context it is by virtue of being able 	to stand alone encoding no matter what.

To this he is able to object, keenly, that an embedded string’s sentencehood ‘cannot reside’ just in its capacity to stand alone – thus targeting with precision the emendations, both entirely his, I highlighted with italics just now.  For, he goes on to explain (214 f.) ‘an embedded sentence may have the same form as asserted strings, etc., but nevertheless have, in its embedded state, a totally different non-thought expressing use’.  Maybe so; but my own P stands unthreatened by this observation.  The man Barker devastates is a straw one of his own manufacture.

2.    Barker’s §2 opens with three inducements for his contention that ‘C-strings, pace Dudman, express thoughts’ (212).
    The first is that ‘C-strings can combine with expressions that are apparently sentential operators’ (212).  But the expressions in question transpire to be the coordinators ‘and’ and ‘or’, and ground for supposing these to be confined to the role of ‘sentential operator’ is not forthcoming.  Also, ‘C-strings can combine . . . with quantifiers’.  But it is hard to see the force of this either, in the face of examples like ‘To everyone’s surprise ...’, which incorporate quantifiers, but patently aren’t sentences.
    Barker’s second inducement (212 f., and 212n) for parsing C-strings as sentences relies on the premiss that the string ‘Grannie was/were here now’ is understood exactly the same in ‘If Grannie was/were here now ...’ as in ‘I wish that Grannie was/were here now’.  Of this I remain unpersuaded; but let it be so.  The inference then that C-strings are to be parsed as sentences must invoke the further premiss that formulations of wishes are to be parsed as sentences, something far from obvious.  Good heavens, the strings found expressing contents of wishes seem to have gone out of their way to resist that imputation.  Nor does calling wishing an ‘attitude’ help, for the attitude would be just to having Grannie here now, with the proposition that she is here now as far off as ever.
    The final inducement for parsing C-strings as sentences is that inferences involving conditionals seem to require the conditionals to have component thoughts.  I shall challenge its opening premiss.  Referring in effect to (D) and (E) below, Barker says (213) ‘Intuitively, one would want to say that the if-sentence in (8) ... is grounded in part upon an entailment like (9)’:

	(D)    If everyone with purple hair had been banished yesterday, then Grannie 	          would have been banished yesterday, for she has purple hair.

	(E)    Everyone with purple hair was banished yesterday & Grannie has purple 	          hair  Granny was banished yesterday.

But why should one want to say that?  All we have had time to observe is broad resemblance, hardly justification for so weighty a claim, whatever exactly being grounded in amounts to.  In each of (D) and (E) scrutiny discovers an argument, and these arguments, evidently alike in some regards, are indubitably different in others, each working in its own way with similar material.  Are we to infer a connection as essential as ‘grounding’ from observed mere broad overall similarity?
    Among the differences between (D) and (E) is the presence in just the former of an inflectional form of a modal.  Indeed, (D) is just one variant of (F):

	(F)    If everyone with purple hair had been banished yesterday then Grannie 	          could/would/might have been banished yesterday, because she (always/ 	          often/sometimes/occasionally) has purple hair.

(D) belongs to a system where ‘would’, ‘could’ and ‘might’ are coequal alternatives, a choice to which nothing corresponds in the system (E) belongs to.  Worse, ‘would’, ‘could’ and ‘might’ encode informational factors of a kind different from any found in (E), and importantly different, we can tell.  How could the envisaged grounding  arrangement work, technically?
    But if Barker’s inducements fall short there remains the point, almost universally ignored, that inducements are necessary for seeing in C-strings messages invisible to the naked eye.

3.  A key move follows:

	... in the simplest case, a C-string if-clause must express, although it may not explicitly encode, information about three things: a subject S, a property or root condition r and a time t – a time at which S is supposed to have r.  Let us denote a condition by {S, r, t} (214).

But ability to identify n separate elements in some wider whole provides of itself no rational occasion for expecting some element of that whole to be constituted out of just those n.  And particularly out of these n, for they include an element not encoded in the sentence while excluding one that is.  Specifically, Barker’s trio includes an A-series time he concedes (213) is not compulsorily marked in conditional clauses, while excluding the factor, whatever it is, that governs the choice, compulsory for conditional clauses, between e.g. ‘is’, ‘was/were’ and ‘had been’.
    By those who think in terms of messages, and start from the consideration that English must be a system for formulating them, the proposal to assign a key role to a trio whose members the system manages so differently will not be entertained.  But perhaps that imperative is less obvious and urgent when the question is whether a ‘thought’ mightn’t include Barker’s heterogeneous trio as part of its ‘content’.

4.  ‘Thoughts’ were foisted on me early: ‘I will ... simply adopt the intuitive portrayal of messages as thoughts’ (211).  But the objects of my theory are not things thought but things said, things encoded in sentences for the antediluvian human purpose of transmitting them by broadcasting the sentences.  (The claims are central to my position that these items are identifiable only as encoded in sentences, and that each is open to exact examination by considering how it is encoded in its sentence.)  And anyway, when we come to delineate Barker’s ‘thoughts’, the only public items that come to hand are sentences.  These thoughts are identifiable – exist – only as formulated in sentences, only as interpretations of strings that encode them: only as messages.

5.  Barker is exercised about ‘states of affairs’, and chides me for unclarity touching them (214).  For him, I think, states of affairs provide one place where ‘language reaches up to reality’: they are found in the world and they are expressed by strings:

	what is the condition {Grannie, is here, now} expressed by Granny-were-here-	now if not a state of affairs?  ... the natural view is that thoughts are entities 	that specify states of affairs’ (214).

I see this as an attempt to supply discourse with  ready-made objective reference by fiat.  Given the string ‘Granny is/were here now’, the state of affairs expressed is that of Grannie’s being here now; and the string is uttered truly or falsely depending on the actual state of affairs.  If this is the idea, it is confused: the conceptual mechanisms a language employs for packaging information inevitably impose structures on the items conveyed from mind to mind by using that language, i.e. the encoded messages; but nothing gives occasion for expecting a cognate structure in the realities spoken of.  A simple message demands a subject even when we say ‘It is raining’.  Reality knows nothing of these imperatives.
    In common usage, the same state of affairs which was once present can now be past.  They hold at times, like states simpliciter.  But Barker’s states of affairs outstrip my comprehension, for they have the times of holding part of them.

6.  Let us briefly address the basic grammatical question of outermost structure.  Consider:

	(G)    The cradle will/can’t/may/must/should/needn’t fall
	(H)    If the bough breaks cradle will/can’t/may/must/should/needn’t fall

The natural interpretations of variants of the former are judgements, each having a verdict v – encoded with a modal (WILL, CAN, MUST, etc.) – for an immediate informational factor.  That conditional interpretations of variants of the latter are elaborations of these judgements is hardly to be doubted.  But what is the manner of elaboration?  How, in other words, does c figure in the overall message we call the conditional?
    In ‘If the bough breaks the cradle won’t/mustn’t fall’, what the cradle won’t/mustn’t do is fall, exactly as in ‘The cradle won’t/mustn’t fall’ simpliciter.  Ergo c cannot intrude upon the substance of that unmodified judgement, and must rather affix externally to it.  Conditionals, I conclude, have two immediate informational factors, one encoded in the conditional clause and the other encoded in the rest of the ‘if’-sentence – as Barker had antecedently decided.  
7.  In my terms, the time Barker chooses is the time p of predication.  The elemental simple message or complication (=df m or c encoded in a subject-predicate sentence or clause)  involves a subject s satisfying, or not, a predication condition P(r); and p is the understood A-series time of that.
    Its conception is of course different from that of the A-series time a (formerly ‘y’) a message or complication is propounded about, intuitively.  The times themselves regularly coincide, though.  Thus ‘The cradle fell/did not fall’ encodes a proposition about the cradle’s falling (at p) or not falling (throughout p).  And the judgement ‘The cradle will/mustn’t fall’ encodes is also about the cradle’s falling or not falling (at or during p), for such is the flexibility of aboutness that a judgement is comfortably ‘about’ what its verdict is about.  Since it takes an extra predication to encode one, conditionals have an extra time of predication.  And an extra time-about.  And again we find general coincidence.  When m1 is ventured, for instance, the time a  its c is intuitively about is found to be the time p of Grannie’s being at the garden party.
    But p and a diverge for so-called ‘futurate’ messages.  Each of ‘The conference begins tomorrow’ and ‘[According to our original schedule] the conference began tomorrow’ encodes the currency of a prearrangement, with a the present or past time of that currency, and s, P(r) and p mere coequal factors of what is prearranged.
    Which then is pre-eminent, p or a?  The popular choice is p, sometimes in the clumsy guise ‘time of the event’.  But a critical experiment suggests itself: try a futurate conditional clause.  In fact let us compare the conditional interpretations of (J) and (K):

	(J)    If she was/were at the garden party, Grannie would be drunk
	(K)   If the conference began tomorrow, it would say so in this brochure

Just as the former – call it m2 – can be found affirmed with reference to a garden party presently in progress, so the latter is found affirmed with reference to a prearrangement presently current; and the affinity we discern between the two cases, notwithstanding their different ps, patently relies on the agreement in their values of a.  It is a that is the arbiter.

8.  If conditionals have component messages, these messages must be about the times a and a that the conditional is about.  A proposed antecedent about a time different from that that the analysandum’s c was about would be rejected with loud cries, as would a consequent with a different a from the judgement’s.  These as and as are found to be future, present or past.  Accordingly the theory calls for future-a, present-a or past-a messages to serve as the antecedents and consequents.  In the basic case these will be simple messages in the sense of §7.  
    Investigation discovers that no appropriate message admits of more than one a.  The propositions that Grannie was drunk and that Grannie is drunk and the judgement that Grannie will be drunk evidently exhaust the stock of m1’s feasible components, for instance, and each of these has a different unique a.
    Observe, however, that with Grannie safely in gaol, the same conditional can be affirmed before, during and after the party, hence with its a, and its a, either future, present or past.  An analysis that had m1 using component messages with unique as would be landed ipso facto with different component messages, and hence different conditionals (at least three) depending on the time of day.

9.  It gets worse.  (L) has a conditional interpretation featuring Grannie at a garden party at a and drunk at a, just like (A)’s and (J)’s:

	(L)    If she is at the garden party, Grannie will be drunk.

Call it m3.  Now, observation discovers all three of m1, m2 and m3 affirmable before the garden party, the first and second during it, and the first after it as well.  Confining attention to the case where a and a coincide – Grannie drunk at the garden party – we discover m3 demanding a future a and a and m2 nonpast ones, while m1, as already remarked, isn’t fussy.  How does received theory cope with this?  For as long as the garden party hasn’t started, it ascribes the same future-a antecedent to all three of m1, m2 and m3.  Once the garden party begins, a different because present-a antecedent and consequent accrue to both m1 and m2, and this persists until the garden party is over, when only m1, with a different antecedent and consequent again, is available.  Except that there wouldn’t be an m1 or an m2, because messages are different whose components are different.  As a reaction to the data, this is doubtfully sane, distinguishing where it ought to identify.

10.  What, finally, does c do?  It restricts the application of the judgement.  In the conditional interpretation of ‘If the bough breaks the cradle will fall’ the judgement that the cradle will fall applies just to the case where the bough breaks.  ‘In the event of the bough’s breaking’ captures the idea perfectly.
    What if the bough breaks?  ‘It won’t’ is no answer, because irrelevant: it makes perfect sense to say ‘Whether or not the bough will break, if it does break ...’.  A proper answer will take no account of whether the bough will break, or won’t, or might, whether the bough’s breaking is in any sense possible, or anything like that.  Why should it?  Inconsistency is not to be feared, for ‘the bough breaks’ formulates nothing that could enter into such a relationship.  C-strings do not encode messages.

References

Barker, S.J. 1996.  Parsing if-sentences and the conditions of sentencehood.  Analysis 56: 210-18
Dik, Simon C. 1968.  Coordination: its implications for the theory of general linguistics.  Amsterdam: 	North Holland Publishing Co.
Dudman, V.H.  1984.  Parsing ‘if’-sentences.  Analysis 44: 145-53
Dudman, V.H.  1989.  Vive la Révolution! Mind 98: 591-603
Dudman, V.H.  1990.  Grammar, semantics and conditionals.  Analysis 50: 214-24
Dudman, V.H.  1994.  On a point of Logic.  Analysis 54: 208-14