Conditional antecedents as polar free relatives

Abstract

This short paper outlines a transparent syntax-semantics mapping for the internal structure of a conditional if-clause. Specifically, we show that the conditional-interrogative link (Starr 2009) is straightforwardly accounted for on the if-clause-as-restrictor analysis of conditionals (Lewis 1975; Kratzer 1981, 1986, 2012) when if-clauses are treated as polar free relatives.