Modal tense: if and wish
Name
10988_2023_Article_9401.pdf
Size
763.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2ae5fc4e6ff1a4bcb4ed682926f00928
Author(s)
Crowley, Paul
Date Issued
May 19, 2024
Journal
Linguistics and Philosophy
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Crowley, P. Modal tense: if and wish. Linguist and Philos (2024).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This paper is concerned with uses of certain morphemes, most notably the past, to represent meanings of distance from reality in modal expressions. This class of morphology has been identified with the names subjunctive, fake tense, fake past, modal past and is referred to here as X-marking, after von Fintel and Iatridou (Linguist Philos, 2020). X-marking has been most studied in the context of English conditionals however, it is well-known that the morphology is observed in many non-English languages and can appear in various other types of constructions, including counterfactual desire expressions. I motivate two desiderata for theories of X-marking in pursuit of an analysis that unifies the phenomenon across expression types and languages. I then develop a novel, formally explicit analysis of X-marking which I show to satisfy these desiderata while providing greater empirical coverage of well-known cases compared to existing accounts. The proposed analysis makes use of modal presupposition projection together with pragmatic inference via Maximize Presupposition to provide a unified treatment of X-marking in English conditionals and counterfactual desires expressions of English featuring wish. I show how previous proposals for X-marking cannot satisfy these desiderata, making them insufficient for a unified account. Lastly, I introduce a hypothesis that all varieties of morphology that can be used as X-marking cross-linguistically-including past, imperfective, plural and habitual-are vacuous in both their X-marked and ordinary uses.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09401-5
