Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED TWICE)
Topic: Counterfactuals
The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality
By Sabine Iatridou
Counterfactual constructions convey the meaning that the speaker believes a certain proposition not to hold. This article investigates the morphosyntactic composition of counterfactual conditionals and counterfactual wishes and the question of how the form of counterfactuals is related to their meaning. Across languages, there are combinations of tense, mood, and aspect morphemes that are used repeatedly in the expression of counterfactuality. I discuss the role of all three components.
Keywords: aspect, conditionals, counterfactuals, mood, tense, wishes
Appeared in Linguistic Inquiry
Reposted once on March the 11th, 2005
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Wednesday, 11 January 2006 04:32 GMT
