In this paper, we discuss and analyze . . . ish/-ish in three of its uses: as a modifier of gradable adjectives; as a clause-final particle that hedges on a speaker's degree of commitment to a proposition; and as a general precision-regulator. In each case, . . . ish/-ish makes reference to a degree that is slightly less than the standard for the constituent it applies to. We propose that proposition-modifying . . . ish belongs to the class of metalinguistic degree morphology alongside metalinguistic comparisons, which have received recent attention in the literature (e.g., Giannakidou & Yoon 2011; Morzycki 2011). We argue for a unified analysis of . . . ish/-ish as a degree modifier, where the relevant degree variable can be provided lexically, or through a type-shifting operation that makes available a degree of precision in the sense of Morzycki (2011). This study has implications for research on the semantics of metalinguistic degree morphology, imprecision, speaker-oriented phenomena, and the role of subjectification in semantic change.

Hypothetical conditionals like If you are hungry, your stomach is growling and 'biscuit' conditionals like If you are hungry, there is pizza in the fridge have been analysed as sharing the same syntactic and semantic template, differing only in the presence of an additional pragmatic inference leading to the 'biscuit' effect in the latter case (Franke 2009: a.o.). However, when considering their counterfactual versions, the two forms differ in the verbal morphological make-up of the consequent clause, which posits a challenge to the unified approach. The present papers develops an analysis of tense and mood morphology within the unified approach where the key idea is that counterfactuals biscuits involve breaking Sequence of Tense and so-called Sequence of Mood. Unacceptable biscuit and hypothetical forms are ruled out via pragmatic competition between weaker and stronger forms and via the Gricean Principle of Manner.

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We discuss the semantic contribution and distribution of conditional antecedents containing the discourse particle denn (“antecedents with denn”, abbreviated as AWD). We propose that AWDs occur only in contexts where (i) the speaker does not believe the antecedent proposition p to hold, and (ii) the truth of p has been nonexplicitly (= tacitly) proposed. To gain a better understanding of (ii), we conduct two corpus studies. The first study investigates the relative location of AWDs with respect to their consequents. We find that unlike antecedents of regular hypothetical conditionals, AWDs occur significantly more often after the material in the consequent and parenthetically inside this material than before it. In a second study, we investigate the position of the tacit proposal relative to the AWD. We find that it typically precedes the AWD. Both results are in accordance with (ii). We then present a classification of the types of tacit proposals that we find with AWDs: speakers use AWDs to qualify their own statements or to doubt proposals of others, in both cases managing potential updates to the common ground.

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