In Philosophy there exists an enormous body of expertise on the meaning of conditionals. However, these theories generally do not explain how the meaning of these sentences is related to their form. Presently we can observe a growing interest in this linguistic question. But due to of the complexity of the topic the theoretical landscape looks very heterogeneous: there is a lot of variation with respect to the particular problems addressed and the formalisms used.
The goal of this course is to structure and analyze the landscape of compositional approaches to the semantics of conditionals. We will start with developing a clear idea of what such an approach should achieve. We will formulate concrete constraints for the syntactic input of such a theory, as well as for the semantic output that it should produce. With these constraints at hand, we will discuss and evaluate the recent literature in the field.
