Abstract

The object of our investigation is expressing necessary conditions in natural language, particularly in a certain kind of conditional sentences, the so-called Anankastic Conditionals 2, a topic brought into the linguistic discussion by the seminal papers and. A typical AC is the following sentence, Sæbø’s standard example: If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train. Sæbø analyses the sentence by means of the modal theory in, according to which a modal has two contextual parameters, a modal base f and an ordering source g. The modal base contains relevant facts and the ordering source contains an ideal like wishes, moral laws and the like. Normally, the antecedent of a necessity-conditional is added to the modal base. Sæbø’s new proposal for the analysis of the AC is that the antecedent without the information ‘you want’, called inner antecedent, is added to the ordering source