Routes Towards The Irrealis

Abstract

Irrealis markers are characterized by the rampant heterogeneity of their distributional patterns and by the tendency to appear as portmanteau morphemes encoding other grammatical categories (e.g. person). These and other characteristics may find an explanation in diachronic terms, by taking into account the sources from which irrealis markers derive. In this paper, the most frequent sources of irrealis markers are identified by means of a diachronic-typological survey based on a 100-language sample: these include lexical verbs such as 'go', 'want' or 'be', former subordinate clauses that come to be used as main clauses through insubordination and deictic expressions that refer to distant elements. Considering the diachrony of irrealis markers allows us to explain some of their properties such as, among others (i) their distribution across the domain of non-actualized situation types, (ii) the primacy of certain non-actualized situation types that happen to work as bridgeheads in the diachronic development from the source to the target irrealis marker, (iii) the frequent co-encoding of person and reality status by means of the same markers, and (iv) the existence of ergativity splits involving irrealis clauses. The diachronic-typological survey conducted in this paper has some implications on the debate on the validity of reality status as a grammatical category with two opposite values of realis and irrealis: it will be argued that the diachronic scenarios leading to the emergence of irrealis markers are not substantially different from those known from the literature on the emergence of modal markers, which makes reality status superfluous as an independent grammatical category.

Down the paths to the past habitual: its historical connections with counterfactual pasts, future in the pasts, iteratives and lexical sources in Ancient Greek

“…While such typological research has confirmed that the past habitual is cross-linguistically used to express various functions falling under the problematic descriptive header of irrealis, it has also shown that the forms expressing habituality and some irrealis functions display "considerable structural and functional diversity cross-linguistically" (Cristofaro 2004: 261). 6 Since the utility of the descriptive notion of irrealis has met with growing critique (Haan 2012;Sansò 2020), it would appear prudent to move away from such form-functional comparison on a larger scale and focus on the description of specific diachronic paths leading to past habituality. After all, Sansò's (2020: 24) diachronic typological survey of irrealis markers recently concluded that such synchronically multi-functional markers have undergone a long historical process whereby they obtained the different functions that fall under the irrealis label.…”

“…An historical path would perhaps be even of cross-linguistic importance because there are languages which use habitual aspect to express counterfactuals e.g. in Hindi (Karawani 2014: 112), Modern Greek (Mendez Dosuna 2017 or in Ute where it marks future, habitual, future in the past, counterfactual, and other functions (Givón 2011: 134;Sansò 2020). Finally, epistemic certainty also plays a role in the development of the future usage of will, since it passed through a similar pivotal stage where volition is interpreted as proclivity (Ziegeler 2006(Ziegeler , 2013contra Bybee et al 1994: 156-158).…”