The nature and origins of counterfactuality in simple clauses

linden, An Van; Verstraete, Jean‐Christophe

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.03.008

Cited by 44 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Van linden & Verstraete (2008) explain in depth why there is polarity reversal in the CF context. They come up with a compelling proposal according to which counterfactuality is derived as a pragmatic implicature.…”

Section: Counterfactuality As a Pragmatic Implicaturementioning

confidence: 91%

Pathways of Counterfactual Markings: A Diachronic Typology

Qian¹

2017

IJEL

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Previous accounts show that markings of CF (counterfactual) clauses tend to be complex. One frequent combination of markers that shows up in many languages is that of a past tense together with perfect in past CFs. According to Dahl (1997), the stacking use of CF markings consists of elements of varying historical layers. This motivates a closer look at the diachronic history of each marking in the combinations that do occur. This paper is therefore devoted to a diachronic development of CF markings. A diachronic study of frequently used CF markers such as past tense, perfective/imperfective aspect, irrealis mood markers is conducted. I propose a cross-linguistic whole life-cycle of CF markers which start as pragmatic clues, termed as CFEnhancing (Counterfactual Enhancing) markers in this paper. The following part will address the question concerning the origins of counterfactuality ahead of the main discussion.

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Section: Counterfactuality As a Pragmatic Implicaturementioning

confidence: 91%

Pathways of Counterfactual Markings: A Diachronic Typology

Qian¹

2017

IJEL

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“…The seemingly incongruous appearance of the realis su x in the doubly irrealis construction is reminiscent of 'fake tense' and 'fake aspect' found in counterfactual conditional constructions in many languages (see, e.g., Bjorkman and Halpert to appear, Fleischman 1989, Iatridou 2000, Van Linden and Verstraete 2008. In the counterfactual constructions in question, morphemes that in other constructions indicate past tense, perfect aspect, or imperfective aspect, enter into a construction where they no longer mark the tense or aspect that they do elsewhere, but rather contribute to the counterfactual conditional meaning of the construction.…”

Section: The Doubly Irrealis Construction In Simple Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nanti reality status system: Implications for the typological validity of the realis/irrealis contrast

Michael¹

2014

Linguistic Typology

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TitleThe Nanti reality status system: Implications for the typological validity of the realis/irrealis contrast The Nanti reality status system: Implications for the typological validity of the realis/irrealis contrast Lev Michael University of California, BerkeleyAbstract This paper describes the reality status system of Nanti (Arawak) and argues that it constitutes an instance of a canonical reality status system. The relevance of such a system is examined in the light of literature that casts doubt on the typological validity of reality status as cross-linguistic grammatical category. It is shown that reality status in Nanti is an obligatory inflectional category, and that the distribution of realis and irrealis marking across Nanti construction types hews closely to expectations based on a notional understanding of the 'realis' and 'irrealis' categories grounded in a contrast between 'realized' and 'unrealized' situations. It is also shown that the Nanti reality status system does not exhibit evidence of being based, either synchronically or diachronically, on semantically narrower notions that could account for the distribution of reality status marking in the language, without recourse to the more generalized notions of realized and unrealized events. It is suggested that the Nanti reality status system might serve as a suitable canonical system around which a canonical typology of reality status might be built.

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“…Thus, even if the hearer does not already know the conflicting facts targeted by the counterfactual antecedent, she can infer them from the speaker's use of subjunctive mood. The factual information conveyed by counterfactuals (i.e., counterfactual antecedent falsity) has initially been identified as a presupposition phenomenon (Levinson, 1983; Fauconnier, 1994), although alternative accounts in terms of presuppositional and scalar implicatures have been presented recently (Verstraete, 2008; Leahy, 2011). All accounts agree that a pragmatic inference process is initiated to arrive at the (backgrounded) factual meaning of a counterfactual antecedent.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marking the counterfactual: ERP evidence for pragmatic processing of German subjunctives

Kulakova

Freunberger

Roehm

2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Counterfactual conditionals are frequently used in language to express potentially valid reasoning from factually false suppositions. Counterfactuals provide two pieces of information: their literal meaning expresses a suppositional dependency between an antecedent (If the dice had been rigged…) and a consequent (… then the game would have been unfair). Their second, backgrounded meaning refers to the opposite state of affairs and suggests that, in fact, the dice were not rigged and the game was fair. Counterfactual antecedents are particularly intriguing because they set up a counterfactual world which is known to be false, but which is nevertheless kept to when evaluating the conditional's consequent. In the last years several event-related potential (ERP) studies have targeted the processing of counterfactual consequents, yet counterfactual antecedents have remained unstudied. We present an EEG/ERP investigation which employed German conditionals to compare subjunctive mood (which marks counterfactuality) with indicative mood at the critical point of mood disambiguation via auxiliary introduction in the conditional's antecedent. Conditional sentences were presented visually one word at a time. Participants completed an acceptability judgment and probe detection task which was not related to the critical manipulation of linguistic mood. ERPs at the point of mood disambiguation in the antecedent were compared between indicative and subjunctive. Our main finding is a transient negative deflection in frontal regions for subjunctive compared to indicative mood in a time-window of 450–600 ms. We discuss this novel finding in respect to working memory requirements for rule application and increased referential processing demands for the representation of counterfactuals' dual meaning. Our result suggests that the counterfactually implied dual meaning is processed without any delay at the earliest point where counterfactuality is marked by subjunctive mood.

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The nature and origins of counterfactuality in simple clauses

Cited by 44 publications

References 23 publications

Pathways of Counterfactual Markings: A Diachronic Typology

Pathways of Counterfactual Markings: A Diachronic Typology

The Nanti reality status system: Implications for the typological validity of the realis/irrealis contrast

Marking the counterfactual: ERP evidence for pragmatic processing of German subjunctives

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