Focus on Conditional Conjunction

The most in-depth analyses of this phenomenon have argued that it is a case of systematic ambiguity, where the word and found in CCs has a different meaning from its normal one (Culicover & Jackendoff 1997; Klinedinst & Rothschild 2012). In this paper, I will insteadpursue an analysis that does not assume two meanings for and but rather treats CCs as structures where a modal or adverb of quantification takes scope over an otherwise standard conjunction, as sketched in (2), the structure I propose for (1a) above. I argue that the special CC meaning arises when this modal element is focus-sensitive and thus allows the unfocussed portion of the sentence to join its restriction. For the structure in (2), the unfocussed portion of the

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