Introduction

Abstract

This chapter acknowledges that the meanings of conditionals have been hotly debated and yet, despite decades of research on this topic, no definitive or agreed upon solution has been reached. Although it has long been acknowledged that conditionals in English are expressed in ways other than using the standard ‘if p, q’ sentence form, and that conditional sentences using ‘if’ can be put to a multitude of uses other than to express conditional thoughts, what is still lacking is an account that brings all of these uses and forms of conditionals together. This chapter sets the research agenda for the remainder of the book, putting forward the claim that the full range of conditionals can be satisfactorily semantically represented only when we locate their meanings at the level of thought.