Negation and Alternatives in Conditional Antecedents

Abstract

A number of authors, beginning with Alonso-Ovalle (2006), have used conditional antecedents to argue for the presence of alternatives in semantics. In this tradition, recent experimental work from Ciardelli et al. (2018b) and Schulz (2018) uses data from conditional antecedents to investigate the interaction between negation and alternatives. We contribute to this line of inquiry with an experiment to test a number of semantics of conditionals through their predictions on the relationship between alternatives and negation (namely, Fine, 2012; Alonso-Ovalle, 2006; Ciardelli et al., 2018b; Willer, 2018; Schulz, 2018). We find experimental support for a variant of Schulz’s theory and against all other accounts we consider.