Two Types of Concessive Conditionals in English and Their Implications to the Semantics of 'even'

영어의 두 가지 양보조건문과 even의 의미에 대한 함의

The aim of this paper is twofold: to identify two types of even if concessive conditionals, standing-ifs and introduced-ifs (Bennett 1982) in terms of whether the truth of the consequent is 'entailed' (the consequent-entailment problem in terms of Lycan 2001); and to analyze these two types of concessive conditionals in a compositional way. Here we argue that, following Guerzoni and Lim (2007), even if conditionals can be analyzed as the cases where even gets its focus in conditionals. We also argue that the consequent-entailment problem can be accounted for in a compositional way if we identify the focus as well as the scope of even in conditionals correctly. We further argue that the analysis presented in this paper supports the scope theory of even, among two theories of even previously proposed in various works. We also consider the possibility where concessive conditionals without even can be analyzed as an extension of the analysis proposed in this paper.