Rhetorical interpretation of counterfactuals
Abstract
This article examines what I call a “rhetorical” interpretation of counterfactual conditionals. The standard interpretation of counterfactual conditionals implies that “there is a possibility that such and such proposition would/might be true. The rhetorical reading of counterfactual conditionals implies that “such and such proposition would NEVER be true.” The subjunctive conditional with a rhetorical interpretation will be called “rhetorical counterfactual.” The examples of rhetorical counterfactuals are found in the emphatic construction (“koso –e construction”) in Early Japanese. I argue that rhetorical counterfactuals are best represented by the semantics of the logical connective only-if, and that the rhetorical reading results from the rhetorical implication that the antecedent is not going to be true with respect to what the speaker considers “conceivable.”
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