Adnominal conditionals in German

Abstract

Abstract In this short paper I give a description of salient structural and semantic properties of adnominal conditional clauses in German, drawn from online corpora (cf. Lasersohn 1996 for the English counterpart). Facts from prosody tentatively indicate, and from Binding, DP-internal distribution and extraposition more distinctively suggest, the paper’s main conclusion: Syntactically, adnominal conditionals behave like restrictive relative clauses. I sketch a recent analysis by Frana (2017), which captures important semantic properties of the construction. A restrictor analysis of conditional clauses can be retained and indeed fits snugly with the fact that only intensional nouns co-occur with, e.g. can be modified by, adnominal conditionals.