Fall 2026
Title: Exploring fake modality in conditional antecedents
[joint work with Stefan Kaufmann]
Abstract: Conditionals can serve to characterize possibly non-actual states of affairs. The recent literature adopts the term X-marking (von Fintel & Iatridou 2023) for linguistic forms that serve to indicate remoteness from the actual state of affairs (including genuinely counterfactual ones). Particular attention has been paid to forms that ordinarily mark tense and aspect, but appear repurposed as X-markers in conditionals, as for instance “fake past” in “If I arrived tomorrow, I’d miss the talk." The question whether such forms retain their regular temporal and aspectual meaning in such contexts has been debated extensively (“past-as-past” vs. “past-as-modal”). Building on observations with different types of fake past from previous work, I will discuss English “were to” in conditional antecedents and select other contexts, where it appears to lack the deontic or teleological meaning familiar from indicative “is to”. Remoteness marking “were to” in conditional antecedents can thus be classified as “fake modality”. Having put in place a detailed account of “is to”, I will argue that the seemingly non-modal occurrences are best analyzed as retaining the modal meaning, and that this correctly predicts restrictions that distinguish “were to” antecedents from regular simple past X-marking. I will briefly compare the behavior of “were to” with similar effects found for English “should” and related modals in German and Italian.
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD