Modal tense: if and wish
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 v...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Springer Science and Business Media LLC
2024
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/155079 |
| _version_ | 1811089583715123200 |
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| author | Crowley, Paul |
| author_facet | Crowley, Paul |
| author_sort | Crowley, Paul |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:21:30Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/155079 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:21:30Z |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1550792024-09-11T04:52:34Z Modal tense: if and wish Crowley, Paul 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. 2024-05-28T19:45:56Z 2024-05-28T19:45:56Z 2024-05-19 2024-05-26T03:10:58Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0165-0157 1573-0549 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/155079 Crowley, P. Modal tense: if and wish. Linguist and Philos (2024). PUBLISHER_CC en 10.1007/s10988-023-09401-5 Linguistics and Philosophy Creative Commons Attribution https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The Author(s) application/pdf Springer Science and Business Media LLC Springer Netherlands |
| spellingShingle | Crowley, Paul Modal tense: if and wish |
| title | Modal tense: if and wish |
| title_full | Modal tense: if and wish |
| title_fullStr | Modal tense: if and wish |
| title_full_unstemmed | Modal tense: if and wish |
| title_short | Modal tense: if and wish |
| title_sort | modal tense if and wish |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/155079 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT crowleypaul modaltenseifandwish |