2.5 Locatives
4.1.4 When-Conditionals
The subject of ‘when-conditional’ sentences occupies a central position in this thesis. As a matter of fact, section 5 will be entirely dedicated to them. Here we shall limit ourselves to a brief exposition.
In [17], de Hoop and de Swart argues that when-conditionals aren’t sensitive to the stage/individual distinction. Instead the distinction has to be drawn between predicates that denote iterable eventualities and once-only predicates. For instance, they notice that when an individual-level predicate is contextually known to express a transitory property, as in (42), the predicate is felicitous in thewhen-clause26:
(42) It seems like Madonna dyes he hair every other week. When she’s blond, she vaguely resembles Marilyn Monroe.
express genericity (or quasi-universality) and the translation of the sentences (40) is not correct using an indefinite article. Most of the examples are due to [45]
25Examples ambiguous between the two readings ([20]):
(i) a. Linguistic theories have posited abstract representations. b. Rescue teams have rescued 28,950 victims.
c. Details will be presented tomorrow. d. Prices went up today.
Moreover, they point out that there are several predicates that are stage-level but are still unacceptable with frequency adverbials and in the protasis of when-conditionals.27
Typical examples are to die orto grow up. (43) a. ??Peter grew up twice.
b. ??When Peter grows up, he inherits a fortune. c. ??Peter died several times.
d. ??When Peter dies, he does it consciously.
According to de Hoop and de Swart, all predicates that are “once-only” are excluded in these contexts. In other words, all predicates that cannot stop holding of a particular individual and start holding again later are excludes. For them, permanent predicates are trivially “once-only”, but since the reverse does not hold, the SLP/ILP distinction is not operative here.
As a matter of fact, in Norwegian, for instance, there are two different words for the English ‘when’ i.e. ‘n˚ar’ and ‘da’. Whereas ‘n˚ar’ is used with iterable eventualities, ‘da’ is used to express the ‘time of reference’28as seen in the following examples:
(44) a. Da jeg kom hjem, drakk jeg et glass melk When I got home, I drank a glass of milk.
b. N˚ar jeg ser deg begynner hjertet mitt ˚a sl˚a fortere. When I see you, my heart starts beating faster.
It is part of the meaning of ‘n˚ar’ that the protasis of the sentences where they appear is iterable.
However, it is not clear which kind of theory de Hoop and de Swart actually propose. According to them, in the case of frequency adverbials, “once-only” predicates lead to a plain contradiction. For conditionals, they assume a plurality presupposition that is violated if there is only one maximal time span where the protasis is true. But is this distinction grammatical or belongs to pragmatics? It is not certain what would be their answer to this question. For instance, de Swart writes:
Both the uniqueness presupposition and the plurality condition have a strong pragmatic flavor. Still, they play a role in the semantics, because uniqueness
(i) Around here everyone dyes their hair every other day. Look, today firemen have blond hair.
27Provided its arguments are definite.
28There is however an exception. In the future tense, even if the eventuality described by the when-
clause refers to a particular one. One need to use ‘n˚ar’: (i) a. Vi ordner detn˚ar jeg ser deg imorgen.
and plurality seem to have consequences for thewell-formedness of quantified sentences. ([63], p. 60)
and
The combination of a Q-adverb and predicates such as ‘poss´eder’ and ‘avoir les yeux bleus’ is infelicitous, because such temporary events are not made available by these predicates: they denote permanent properties which the subject either has or does not have. If we want an explanation of these facts we have to give a semantic characterization of different classes of predicates in connection with their quantificational possibilities . This can be found in the contrast between ‘temporary states’ and ‘permanent properties’.29(Idem, p.43 (my emphasis))
To sum up, de Hoop and de Swart assume that there is a semantic difference between some predicates (even if the distinction has a pragmatic flavor): frequency adverbials with ‘once-only’ predicates lead to plain contradiction. But this is unlikely to be true. For example, suppose that a man never had drawn a circle in all his life (or that he did it only once). The following sentences are clearly infelicitous, but in no way they are contradictory.
(45) a. When he draws a circle, he chews on a chewing-gum. b. Usually, he draws circles when he is bored.
But why not posit that all cases are similar to this one, instead of assuming that there is a grammatical difference between predicates with respect to their once-onlyness? As I shall argue extensively later, one shouldn’t accept a lexical division between predi- cates to explain this contrast; the phenomenon is purely pragmatics: no predicates are intrinsicallyonce-only by virtue of their meaning alone.