Anankastic Conditionals

Abstract

This chapter sets out the peculiarities of the type of complex sentence that has become known as anankastic conditionals ( = ‘necessity’) and the ways in which these conditionals have been analyzed in the literature. On the surface, they seem to express that wanting one thing is a sufficient condition for another thing being necessary, but at a deeper level they are felt to convey that the second thing is a necessary condition for the first – and it has proven difficult to reconcile these two points of view. Numerous attempts at a compositional analysis have been offered, augmenting the standard Kratzerian theory of modals and conditionals; yet no consensus has been reached on how anankastic conditionals should best be treated.