Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman & Claire Halpert
Title: In search of (im)perfection: the illusion of counterfactual aspect
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 25, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461
This is a practice talk for NELS 42. The full abstract is available (PDF).
Puzzle: We examine the puzzle of “fake” imperfective aspect in counterfactual conditionals (CFs). “Fake” tense and aspect (Iatridou, 2000) – i.e. morphology that does not seem to make a temporal interpre- tive contribution – is used in many languages to mark CFs. The following example from Greek illustrates both past and imperfective morphology used to mark a future-less-vivid conditional:
[An peθene o arχiɣos] θa ton θavame stin korifi tu vunu if die.PST.IMP the chief FUT him bury.PST.IMP on.the top the mountain
‘If the chief died, we would bury him on the top of the mountain.’
(Iatridou, 2000, ex. (14))The use of “fake” past morphology associated with CF interpretations has been well-documented (Steele, 1975; James, 1982; Iatridou, 2000, a.o.). Several proposals analyze fake past as the locus of CF semantics, either by construing “past” as a marker of modal, rather than temporal, remoteness (Steele, 1975; Iatridou, 2000; Ritter and Wiltschko, 2010) or by deriving CF meaning from a purely temporal past (Ippolito, 2002; Arregui, 2009). It has been claimed that fake imperfective is also involved in the marking of counterfactu- als, though its use is less well-understood: for Iatridou (2000, 2009) imperfective in CFs is a default aspect; Arregui (2004) claims that it reflects incompatibility between perfective and CFs; while Ippolito (2004) pro- poses that a “modal imperfective” reflects a speaker’s indirect evidence for a proposition. Iatridou (2009) proposes that imperfective-marked CFs occur in a subset of the languages with past-marked CFs, a general- ization she based on the fact that Slavic languages have “fake” past but “real” aspect in CFs. We argue that a full typology includes languages with “fake” perfective aspect in CFs as well, to which we return below.
Proposal: We argue that the apparent requirement for imperfective in CFs in some languages is illusory, merely a morphological reflex of the need to realize a true PAST feature. We argue that “past imperfective” morphology inthese languages actually expresses only PAST; itreceives animperfective interpretation dueto contrast with a true PERFECTIVE morpheme. In CFs, this “past imperfective” morphology reflects only CF “past”; in other words, it does not reflect syntactic IMPERFECTIVE features. We illustrate this proposal with the morphological paradigm of three types of languages: (1) Greek, Romance, and Zulu, where imperfective is default and occurs in CFs; (2) Arabic, where perfective is default and occurs in CFs; and (3) Slavic, where PAST is specified independently of aspect, and CFs preserve full aspectual contrasts.