Fabrizio at PhLip 9

A default premise semantics for anankastic conditionals.

November 14-17, Paolo and Fabrizio are up in "the bucolic setting of the Hudson River Valley" for PhLip 9, "a small, workshop-style conference that brings together researchers who are working at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics," annually organized by Chicago's Chris Kennedy and Columbia's Karen Lewis. 

Fabrizio will furthermore be presenting his work providing a "Default premise semantics for anankastic conditionals." Anankastics are conditionals like "If you want to get to Tarrytown from Grand Central by train, you have to take the Metro North Hudson Line," where an instance of "want" in the antecedent seems irrelevant to a modal in the consequent: the Hudson Line is the train from Grand Central to Tarrytown whether you want to get there that way or not! Fabrizio's paper presents a new idea on what explains this, using tools from Jeff Horty's Default Logic.