Irrealis is real

Prince, Kilu von; Krajinović, Ana; Krifka, Manfred

doi:10.1353/lan.2022.0009

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 26 publications

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“…Another category related to the expression of temporal reference is mood, in particular the distinction between realis and irrealis (Bhat, 1999;Palmer, 2001). While realis is used to present an event taken as being actualized or occurring at the moment, irrealis is concerned with unrealized events (de Haan, 2012; Elliott, 2000; see also von Prince et al (2022) for a time-branching treatment of the crosslinguistic differences of realis and irrealis). Irrealis covers several interpretations, prototypically non-factual.…”

Section: Linguistic Background On the Expression Of Time Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

Past and future time reference processing teased apart in Paiwan, an endangered Formosan language

Collart,

Zeitoun

2023

Lang. cogn.

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How the time reference of a sentence is processed based on the grammatical marking of the verb has already been explored in several languages with grammatical tense and aspect. It can also be grammatically expressed according to the reality status of the event (whether the event exists in time, realis mood, or not, irrealis). This study reports results from an acceptability judgment experiment in Paiwan, a Formosan language which exhibits a realis-perfective/irrealis distinction. By placing realis-perfective and irrealis markers after deictic past or future time adverbs and manipulating the grammaticality of the sentences, we asked which temporal concord violation (i.e., realis-perfective or irrealis) was harder to detect. The temporal concord violation of the realis-perfective marker induced greater processing difficulties (interactions between time reference and mood marking revealed lower accuracy rates and longer reaction time), but not the irrealis marker, in line with previous hypotheses. These processing difficulties may be partly due to the Paiwan realis mood marker which also encodes perfective aspect meaning. The reanalysis of the design of previous studies indicates that the interaction with perfective aspect also led to additional processing cost, suggesting that perfective aspect marking plays a crucial role in the processing of time reference.

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Section: Linguistic Background On the Expression Of Time Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

Past and future time reference processing teased apart in Paiwan, an endangered Formosan language

Collart,

Zeitoun

2023

Lang. cogn.

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Counterfactual mood in Czech, German, Norwegian, and Russian

Sæbø

2023

Nat Lang Semantics

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The type of mood or tense marking that causes counterfactuality inferences—as figuring prominently, but far from exclusively, in counterfactual conditionals—has not yet received a comprehensive and compositional analysis. Focusing on four languages, the paper presents under-appreciated facts and a novel theory where the mood serves to activate alternatives to modal operators, particularly one: the identity operator, often giving rise to counterfactual implicatures.

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Irrealis as modality: evidence from Gιsιɖa Anii

Morton,

Blanchette

2024

J. Ling.

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Using data from the understudied language Gιsιɖa Anii, we provide a formal analysis of irrealis that builds on the framework of modality proposed in Giannakidou and Mari. In particular, we propose that Anii has an irrealis modal morpheme whose meaning is that the speaker does not believe that the proposition is true at a particular time. This gives irrealis, at least in Anii, a negatively biased meaning. Giannakidou and Mari propose that the subjunctive in European languages is a positively biased modal but find no evidence in their data for a corresponding negatively biased one. However, in expanding their approach to a completely unrelated language, we show that modal bias can also be negative, filling in the paradigmatic gap left open by Giannakidou and Mari’s work. We also illustrate the utility of analyzing irrealis (in relation to the concept of veridicality) as a morphosyntactic and semantic category with a status similar to tense and aspect. Our formal analysis accounts for the obligatory realization of irrealis in a wide range of semantic contexts in Anii, including future tense, negation, and wishes, and shows how irrealis can be composed with other clausal elements. We suggest that reality status, which we analyze as (non)-veridicality, is obligatorily present in the Anii clause and discuss the implications of this for other languages.

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Irrealis is real

Cited by 9 publications

References 26 publications

Past and future time reference processing teased apart in Paiwan, an endangered Formosan language

Past and future time reference processing teased apart in Paiwan, an endangered Formosan language

Counterfactual mood in Czech, German, Norwegian, and Russian

Irrealis as modality: evidence from Gιsιɖa Anii

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