Anankastic conditional

{{Short description|Grammatical construction}}

An anankastic conditional is a grammatical construction of the form

:If you want X, you have to do Y.

where Y is required in order to get X. For example:

:If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.{{citation|title=Wannabe|author=Spice Girls|work=Spice|year=1996|publisher=Virgin Records}}

Not all conditionals of this form have an anankastic interpretation:

:If you want to eat chocolate, you should try thinking about something else.

where thinking about something else is not required in order to eat chocolate, but is rather advice on how to avoid eating chocolate.{{cite journal |last1=Condoravdi |first1=Cleo |last2=Lauer |first2=Sven |title=Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals |journal=Semantics and Pragmatics |date=2016 |volume=9 |page=2 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.9.8 |access-date=17 August 2024}}

The term comes from the Greek ἀναγκαστικός "compulsory", from ἀνάγκη "necessity."{{Cn|date=August 2024}}

Anankastic conditionals have been argued to pose problems for compositional semantics.{{cite journal |last1=Sæbø |first1=Kjell Johan |title=Notwendige Bedingungen im Deutschen: zur Semantik modalisierter Sätze |journal=Papiere des SFB 99 |date=1985 |volume=108 |trans-title=Anankastic conditionals in German: On the semantics of modalized sentences |language=German}} Other semanticists have argued that anankastic conditionals can be interpreted the same way as "regular, hypothetical, indicative conditionals".{{cite journal |last1=Condoravdi |first1=Cleo |last2=Lauer |first2=Sven |title=Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals |journal=Semantics and Pragmatics |date=2016 |volume=9 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.9.8 |access-date=17 August 2024}}