SHOULD In Conditional Clauses
Abstract
SHOULD can have two seemingly opposite epistemic values, depending on whether it occurs in a conditional clause or in a main clause:
Labour should win the election.
If Labour should win the election, what would you do?
In the first example, SHOULD expresses both likelihood and the positive expectation of a Labour victory; conversely, in the second example SHOULD carries both a sense of unlikelihood and the negative apprehension of a Labour victory. I propose to account for this semantic alternation by a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, SHOULD will be analyzed as a marker that expresses the speaker’s point of view by qualifying the event as epistemically (un)expected and/or subjectively (un)desirable. On the other hand, IF-conditional clauses will be analyzed as suspending the speaker’s endorsement. The combination of the two results in the primary value of SHOULD being reversed.