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.

Για τον Κεν, µε αγαπη και ευγνωµοσυνη áa äeÌ, Ò ÎÓ·Ó‚ Ë ·Î ‡"Ó‰ ‡ÌÓÒÚ GoalThe goal of this paper is to establish how certain aspects of the meaning of the perfect are composed from the elements present in its morphosyntactic representation. Not all languages have a present perfect that is structurally and interpretationally distinct from a simple past. We will only be looking at languages that make the distinction.1 In languages that have a perfect, there is variation with respect to the range of meanings associated with it. There are certain meaning components that are always found with a perfect and there are others that vary depending, as we will show, on several factors. Background Common characterizationsThere are a number of intriguing issues surrounding the perfect that have drawn considerable attention in the literature, among the most commonly discussed ones being the fact that the perfect shares properties with both temporal and aspectual forms, and that certain adverbials that one would expect to be possible with the perfect are actually disallowed. In this section, we will briefly present the central points concerning these common characterizations.Similarly to the tenses, the perfect temporally locates an eventuality relative to some reference point. Thus, the perfect is often described as expressing anteriority. Consider, for example, sentence (1):(1) Petros has visited Thailand.

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Universal deontic modals may vary with respect to whether they scope over or under negation. For instance, English modals like must and should take wide scope with respect to negation; modals like have to and need to take narrow scope. Similar patterns have been attested in other languages. In this article, we argue that the scopal properties of modals with respect to negation can be understood if (a) modals that outscope negation are positive polarity items ( PPIs); (b) all modals originate in a position lower than I 0 ; and (c) modals undergo reconstruction unless reconstruction leads to a PPI-licensing violation.

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