Counterfactuality

I believe I have hit upon why past tense morphology often is associated with counter-factuality in conditional sentences. To my knowledge, this hasn't been stated before so I thought I should pass it on somehow.

I asked an academic what was the latest/best thinking on this topic and was recommended "Iatridou 2000" ( http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/iatridou/counterfactuality.pdf ).

Now while Sabine Iatridou gives an excellent overview of how languages align themselves with respect to conditional, counter-factuality, subjunctive, imperfective, habitual and what have you, her explanation as to why things are the way they are leaves a bit to be desired. She postulates an "entity" she calls ExclF which is behind both past tense and counter-factuality. Surely it would be simpler, if there was an overwhelming need* to indicate counter-factuality, to have a particle/affix that denotes exactly CF and nothing else.

My explanation for the way things are (in many many languages) is that if there is a past tense/non-past-tense distinction and a particle ("if" in English) that introduced conditional sentences, then inevitably over quite a short period of time, a clause featuring both picks up a very strong CF connotation. In fact this connotation is so strong that the past tense meaning is subsumed.

I will express my idea in two parts. First going over the ways particles/affixes change their meaning over time. Then to do a thought experiments. The thought experiment reveals the main thrust of my idea.

.* But the truth is that there is no great demand for counter-factuals. Imagine hearing "if I was a billionaire, I would fit out a boeing 747 for my personal use". If the hearer knew the speaker to be a lazy dreamer too fond of his grog, then it is quite obvious that we have a CF situation. And on the occasions when the knowledge of the background situation doesn't doesn't shout out "counter-factual", it is easy enough to append "... but that isn't going to happen" to the conditional sentence.

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..... Part 1

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If a word keeps turning up in the same environments(situations) then it will come to connote these situations. Let me give an examples of this …

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... How “since” obtained a subsiduary meaning

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1) I haven’t eaten since breakfast.

2) The local football team hasn’t been doing so good since Peter McCallum broke his leg.

3) Since you’re so clever, you work it out yourself.

A word takes its meaning from the environment it is usually/commonly found in*. And meanings can change if a word is used in a fulcrum** situation or fulcrum suit (a set of fulcrum situations …my terms). “Since” was originally all about time. “Since” denoted a time span from an event in the past up until the present time (1). Then it was used in sentences such as (2). If a child learning English heard (2) they would perfectly reasonably give “since” the meaning “because”. And hence they might come out with utterances such as (3) some time later.

If “a time span from an event in the past up until the present time” meaning was far more common than the “because” meaning. I would say “since” DENOTED “a time span from an event in the past up until the present time” and CONNOTED “because”. (“denoted” and “connoted” are partial cognates). However probably not appropriate here as the two usuages of “since” are about equally common.

When a grammatical word (particle) changes its meaning, often the original meaning is lost. Or alternately the two different usages can quite happily live on in parallel indefinitely. Presumably in the latter case, the ambiguity does not cause that much confusion.

More can be said about particles/affixes changing their meaning, but I think the above encapsulates the basics.

.*Well that is how children normally learn the meaning of a word.

. **The analogy is that in a lever or seesaw the fulcrum doesn’t move, but it is essential for the range of positions that the end of the lever/seesaw can take. I am comparing the change of meaning of the particle to the change in position of the lever-end or seesaw extremity. Now the linguistic term pivot is already firmly established. Was it Dixon who coined this term ? I believe “pivot” and “fulcrum” are different words for the same thing (synonyms). However I have never really got the analogy that presumably being denoted by the word “pivot”. Can anybody enlighten me ?

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..... Part 2

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... The Thought Experiment (TE)

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Imagine a pre-industrial society. The fastest way of getting about is walking : the fastest way of sharing information is by word of mouth. (The above important for my argument : the below is just adding colour) Lets make this society an isolated village … comprising of about 200 adults. It is a hot climate so people spend a lot of their life out of doors. Lets imagine these people as 200 dots on a piece of paper. You can see these dots mingling/moving about ... a bit like brownian motion.

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These people have a language. Remarkably like English in fact. That language has a past tense (PST), non past tense (NPST) distinction. PST is represented by the affix “-d”, NPST is unmarked.

No perfective/imperfective distinction or perfect. Lets keep it simple.

Assume here that “-d” has only past tense meaning in all environments … maybe only grammaticized a few days ago (I know, unlikely, but please bear with me). There is no future tense … well they have a word meaning “intend” but it hasn’t been grammaticized yet.

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... Building the scene

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Old Umara is quite sickly. She loves blood-pudding. Her grandson Puntu is to undergo the initiation into manhood rite quite soon. Only adults from Puntu’s family and the village shaman may attend. The rite is held in the shaman's hut. To try and encourage Umara out of her sick bed, Umara dangles the prospect of blood-pudding. One of the talking points of this community (the word on the street) is …

(1) “If Umara attends* Puntu’s event, they intend to serve blood-pudding.”

(1) is valid right up to the time of the event.

The event is scheduled to happen at midnight on the first day of the new moon. All the community knows this.

After the event (1) is no longer valid, but (2) is valid ... (2) = “If Umara attended Puntu’s event …” ... (We are only considering the “if” clause here (sometimes called the antecedent or protasis)

Now after the rite (the event) news of it will spread … people meeting and chatting like they do.

Now lets go back to our piece of paper with these dots. Imagine if you will a cone under the piece of paper. The point of the cone meets the piece of paper at one point. In fact this point on the paper is the position of the shaman's ’s hut. Sheet of paper is 2-D, cone is 3-D, so we have introduced another dimension. This is the dimension of time. The point where the sheet meets the cone is the place and time of the event (the rite). The cone can be thought of as a “cone of knowledge about the event” (of course I use cone as an idealized shape, the actual shape of the “knowledge volume” will be quite irregular as it depend upon people going about their usual business and chatting together).

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Anyway … the point I am trying to make is that in a short period of time, everyone in the village will know of the event, they will know if Umara in fact managed to go to the rite. If she in fact attended the rite (2) is obsolete. You would only hear (2) in the event that Umara was too sick to attend the event. Assuming that there was a 50% chance that Umara made it to the rite. To account for all eventualities we construct two universes*** ... one in which she attended the rite, and one in which she didn't.

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The chart below I only produced because colouring-in 3D is too difficult for me. It is a 2D slice though the 3D volumes above.

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If you do the maths (that is compare the yellow volume to the light blue volume) you will find that (2) is pronounced in situations of ignorance 28 % of the time and in counterfactual situations 72 % of the time.

It is inevitable in this community that a clause containing “if” + “-d” quickly gets associated with counter factuality.

Now the future can never be said to be counterfactual (in general … I suppose you could construct an elaborate counter example to my statement). But the above example suggests that there is extreme doubt that “he” will take the syrup. Maybe 70% chance he will not take it, 30% chance he will take it.

[ I consider (1) and (2) as proof that I am right ]

Now in TE language, “if” + “-d” is nearly completely associated with counterfacuality. Hence the PST/NPST distinction has been lost. This distinction might be missed. Maybe there will be a future developement in the language to re-instate this distinction.

[I am of course thinking of English using “if” + “pluperfect” to indicate “counterfactual past” … I am not so sure how to explain of this developement. If our TE language had a past perfect would the third conditional be formed at the same time as the second conditional or would it be a subsequent developement (knock on effect ??) ]

.* Notice that in this TE language as in English. “if” plus a verb in indicative mood produce a verb with future** meaning. This isn’t surprising as the main point of these contingency sentences is to make plans ... plans for the future.

.** Just to complicate things a little. We can say that there are two types of verb. Telic verbs and Stative verbs. Telic verbs are verbs where an outside observer would see something happening. “drink” is such a verb. Stative verbs are verbs where an outside observer would not see anything happening. “believe” is such a verb. “if” plus a telic verb in indicative mood produce a verb with future meaning. “if” plus a stative verb in indicative mood produce a verb with future meaning, however this future meaning stretches down to the present (time of speaking). It is this tense that is the most pertinant hence it is said … “if” plus a stative verb in indicative mood produce a verb with present tense meaning.

.*** To account for this you could imagine that the universe split at the time of the rite. Resulting in Universe 1 where Umara attended the rite and Universe 2 where Umara failed to attend the rite. But don't worry your head about this, I am not advovating the "multiverse theory". An alternative way is to look at thing is that there is only one Universe, and some times future contingencies discussed happen and sometimes they fail to happen. I am too lazy to dream up another contingency so I am going with the "multiverse" view. But it doesn't matter one way or the other ... this paper is about linguistics and not theoretical cosmology.

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... Assumptions I have made

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4 constants that I picked

(a) Radius of the community is 4 km

(b) Speed of propogation of information is 1 km/hour

(c) Time that disinterest sets in is 16 hours

(d) A considered future conditional situation will actually materialize half the time.

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3 things that I assumed

(a) The community area has uniform population density

(b) People are equally talkative 24 hours a day

(c) Disinterest is sudden instead of gradual

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But all the above comes out in the wash. I like to talk about specifics to make my explanation more vivid. I of course played around with these constants to give me around 70% counter-factuality. As an L1 English speaker I felt that this percantage was about right.

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... Post Script

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I hope I have explained why (by way of typical human interaction) "past tense morphology" (by itself straight forward and unambiguous) plus "if" (by itself a pretty straight forward marker of conditional sentence) have come together. And together have a meaning ◌̴70% counter-factual.

I deliberately set my thought experiment in a pre-industrial age. Whether things like mobile phones and people zooming about in automobiles would affect the process described is an interesting question.

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... Other considerations

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Pluperfect

There must be an explanation of why, if a language has an indicative/subjunctive distinction as well as a past/non-past distinction (i.e. a four-way split), it is inevitable that the "subjunctive + past" verb form is associated with counter-factuality (I suspect this is quite easy)

There also must be an explanation of why, if a language has a imperfective/perfective distinction as well as a past/non-past distinction (i.e. a four-way split), it is inevitable that the "imperfective + past" verb form is associated with counter-factuality (a bit more challenging). Perhaps it is the habitual meaning associated with the imperfective that is key here.

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... Other languages

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Finnish and Swahili

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I am interested to study a fair number of languages to find out what percentage of languages in general have a counter-factual derived by the same forces that shaped the English counter-factual.

As of this moment in time I have surveyed two ... Finnish and Swahili.

. Finnish

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. Swahili

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The Swahili verb incorporates (at the least) a subject marker and tense/aspect marker. For example ...

nitakaa = I will stay

ni-ta-kaa
3SG-FUT -stay