Yeah. I mean , I 'm  I 'm s curious about how much of the mental  I mean , I 'm not sure that the formalism , sort of the grammatical side of things ,  is gonna have that much going on in terms of the mental space stuff. You know , um , basically all of these so - called space builders that are in the sentence are going to sort of  I think of it as , sort of giving you the coordinates of , you know  assuming that at any point in discourse there 's the possibility that we could be sort of talking about a bunch of different world scenarios , whatever , and the speaker 's supposed to be keeping track of those. The , um  the construction that you actually get is just gonna sort of give you a cue as to which one of those that you 've already got going , um , you 're supposed to add structure to.
Mm - hmm.
So " in France , uh , Watergate wouldn't have hurt Nixon " or something like that. Um , well , you say , " alright , I 'm supposed to add some structure to my model of this hypothetical past France universe " or something like that. The information in the sentence tells you that much but it doesn't tell you like exactly what it  what the point of doing so is. So for example , depending on the linguistic con uh , context it could be  like the question is for example , what does " Watergate " refer to there ? Does it , you know  does it refer to , um  if you just hear that sentence cold , the assumption is that when you say " Watergate " you 're referring to " a Watergate - like scandal as we might imagine it happening in France ". But in a different context , " oh , you know , if Nixon had apologized right away it wouldn't  you know , Watergate wouldn't have hurt him so badly in the US and in France it wouldn't have hurt him at all ". Now we 're s now that " Watergate "  we 're now talking about the real one ,
They 're real , right.