“This book is a treasure of the puzzles, illustrations, and parables that have shaped the modern view of the language of modals and conditionals. It defines the standard against which all theorizing on the subject is to be measured. A classic.”

–Barry Schein, University of Southern California

“This work collects and dramatically expands upon Angelika Kratzer’s now classic papers. There is scarcely an area of philosophy that remains or will remain untouched by their influence.”

–Jason Stanley, Rutgers University

“The book is certainly worth reading, for it is a product of rare scientific beauty, reflecting years of serious intellectual enterprise undertaken by its renowned author, whose already classical works have been studied and cited by generations of linguists…I recommend the book to all linguists interested in matters of modality, conditionality and counterfactuality. These are highly complex matters but even so the author writes about them in such a clear, logical and honest manner, that it turns the process of reading into an exciting intellectual adventure.”

—Linguist List

Angelika Kratzer was educated at the Universities of Munich, Konstanz, Heidelberg and Wellington/New Zealand and is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her areas of specialization are semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. Research interests include event and situation semantics, context dependency, modals and conditionals, argument structure, verbal inflectional morphology, cross-linguistic quantification, the typology of pronouns, and meaning and intonation. With Irene Heim, Angelika Kratzer is co-author of Semantics and Generative Grammar (Blackwell, 1998) and co-founder and co-editor of Natural Language Semantics.