How Does "If" Work? The Semantics of Conditionals
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- Опубликовано: 5 мар 2019
- What's in our minds when we throw an if/then sentence out there? How do we work out what worlds we may be talking about? In this week's episode, we talk about the semantics of conditionals: what an "if" looks like logically, why a simple logical arrow isn't enough to capture the complexities of conditionals, and how we change what possibilities we allow ourselves to think of based on what our "if" clause holds.
This is Topic #95!
This week's tag language: Kyrgyz!
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Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on other kinds of conditional sentences, at: www.thelingspace.com/episode-95/
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
The theory of conditionals here dates back to Kratzer's 1986 paper "Conditionals," which is where that quote at the end comes from: semanticsarchive.net/Archive/T...
The idea of if-clauses as restrictors actually goes back to David Lewis' 1975 paper "Adverbs of Quantification," which you can find here: www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Adve....
The presentation was based mostly on some of the usual semantic suspects:
web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim...,
Seth Cable's course notes: people.umass.edu/scable/LING62...
schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-S....
Crucial inspiration also from here books.google.ca/books?id=1NwWD... , in a chapter by Ilaria Frana titled "Modality in the Nominal Domain: The Case of Adnominal Conditionals."
There's also a series of videos on RUclips that explores the topic from a more philosophical point-of-view, and arrives at a different conclusion, but might still be of interest, starting here: • PHILOSOPHY - Language:...
#linguistics #semantics #TheLingSpace
Looking forward to next time!
Today I realized I haven't watched videos from this channel in a while (2 years) and was shocked how sudden was the break in production.
They had plans, with no indication of stopping, and then not a single word on youtube, twitter, facebook, tumblr or their website.
It took me a while to verify that Moti was even alive at least a year later,
and is running a Montreal "Argo" bookstore with "book club with readthrough of Japanese classics" (really sounds like him)
The bookstore is unsurprisingly struggling through covid lockdowns.
Is this channel no longer active?
Pity this channel died so suddenly without closure, but I guess sometimes projects like this just die out; you tell yourself you'll continue when you find the time and it just never happens because life has other plans. I hope everybody involved is doing well these days. And thanks a lot for the existing videos!
I miss this channel
RIP to this wonderful channel
>last upload: 1 year ago
Oh no... I just discovered your channel. I hope you'll keep uploading, this is really good stuff.
None yet. 😢
@@kiroky95I had completely forgotten about this channel until now.
Life changed so much in five years. Absolutely unbelievable.
See you in another 5 years, when yet another stranger joins the excruciatingly long funeral.
I graduated from undergrad linguistics in 2015 and then moved onto something else; I remember that in second year semantics, we covered the "first-order logic" explanation of "if/then", and then in third year, we did extensional semantics, with one week of intensional semantics introduced at the end. You just took me past that, at least in the ways relevant to explaining conditional statements, in like 12 minutes. Thank you and congrats!
How's Mcdonalds working out for you?
After 5 years I'm still waiting for more videos. Please do them. Cheers from Spain Basque Country.
Hey, I was talking to a friend and I remembered this Channel; luckily I've been able to find it again :) Your videos are great! I hope you could make a new one in the future
Thanks so much for this channel. I teach college courses online and love sociolinguistics, in particular. I enjoy sharing these videos with students as the content and video quality is top notch.
That's really neat! I take all my college online, so a good online teacher is always appreciated!
Zerb Games thank you! I am always learning from students as well so online teaching is very fun for me. :D
Have you been checking my search history? That is exactly what I’ve been curious about.
Can you make an episode about the ins and outs of "asking question" or there's already one? Does the brain first make a best guess of what the expected answer would be and then re-write it into a question, or we are wired to shoot directly for the right sentence structure? What's the role of idiomatic questions and their structure, does that influence/limits the scope of questions we can ask in different situations?
Where have you guys gone?
Hello, anybody here!📝
You are very good, sir!
what happened to this channel
Same ;(
nice to see a new video! welcome back (or did i miss one recently?)
Have you done a video on light verbs and how they can cause transitivity? I.e. How it's possible to make an intransitive verb transitive by adding little v to the structure... would love to see it. Also how does structure differ with ergative verbs?
Sputnik Sweetheart, I love that book!
Berlin, Potsdam, Templin, a copy of _Run Lola Run_ on the shelf. Been spending time in Berlin/Brandenburg?
Good video but can the background music be lessened in volume so we can hear Moti better. Thanks.
F
Good video, I need to watch it again, because I still don't understand how a predicate being false, leads to the whole sentence evaluating to true. I'm assuming it's because the IF works like an OR disjunction in propositional logic.
Is IF really OR in disguise? The Venn diagrams seem to suggest so. But I could be wrong, it's 3am here
Sort of. In propositional logic, "IF A THEN B" (A -> B) is equivalent to "(NOT A) OR B" (¬A v B).
@@cavalrycome That's it, thank you! It still doesn't make sense why it works that way. Outside of logic, my intuition for an IF statement, is that it implies something that must be true for what follows to be possibly true.
@@Lunsterful I agree, it's intuitively clear how to evaluate it when the antecedent is true, but if you want to have a logical operator that also has a truth value when the antecedent is false, you have to make a decision about how to fill in the rest of the truth table (i.e., the rows that covers that circumstance) and someone at some point arbitrarily decided to assign those rows "true".
A B | A -> B
1 1 | 1 (intuitive)
1 0 | 0 (intuitive)
0 1 | 1 (needed for completeness)
0 0 | 1 (needed for completeness)
Do you have a degree in linguistics or foreign languages and literatures ? Or did you study those things by yourself ?
It sounds like my neurolinguistic programming has some bugs. Pls fix!
This is super pedantic since it's in a different area of study from linguistics, but you're statement about how logicians use if/implication is generally true for classical logic, but not all logics. Paraconsistent logic for instance is explicitly designed to express these other meanings of "if".
This man was arrested. I can't believe it.
source?
are you a furry too? ^_^
You've obviously got a lot of knowledge to share. Unfortunately your videos leave me a bit bewildered as there is no room made for comprehension. Please quit editing all pauses out. Just like you need to breath, those watching need to process. Dig the shirts though, and the intro is cool.