Cross-linguistic variation in the strength of counterfactuality: the role of tense (LILA)

This coming Wednesday, February 16, 2022, we'll welcome Zahra Mirrazi (Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at UMass Amherst ) as our next LILA speaker of this semester.

Here are the title and abstract. The talk will be over zoom.

Cross-linguistic variation in the strength of counterfactuality: the role of tense

Zahra Mirrazi

PhD candidate in linguistics at UMass Amherst

In the linguistic and philosophical literature, the term counterfactual conditional (a.k.a.

subjunctive conditionals) refers to conditionals like (1a) whose antecedents are inferred to be false in reality (i.e. actual world). In contrast, the conditional in (1b) whose antecedent can be true in the actual world is referred to as indicative conditionals.

                (1)       a. If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over.

b. If the newborn kangaroo has no tail, it will topple over.

Across natural languages, the difference between the two conditionals is reflected in their linguistic ingredients. Many unrelated languages use the past tense in the antecedent of counterfactual conditionals, as in (1a). Most linguistic work on conditionals is focused on deriving the semantic and pragmatic differences between counterfactual and indicative conditionals from the compositional interpretation of their linguistic ingredients. A successful semantics for these conditionals should be able to capture the cross-linguistic patterns in forming counterfactuals, namely the presence of past tense morphology in the antecedent of counterfactual conditionals across unrelated languages. In particular, it should be able to answer this question: What is the contribution of ‘past’tense to the meaning of counterfactuals? Crucially, it should also be able to account for the cross-linguistic variation in the expression and the interpretation of counterfactuality.

Persian counterfactuals are also formed via past tense. Unlike English and other languages that  use past tense to express counterfactuality, however, the counterfactuality of antecedents of Farsi counterfactual conditionals is not cancelable. In this talk, I aim to answer this question:

what is the source of cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of counterfactuals formed via past tense?