The Morphosemantics of Warlpiri Counterfactual Conditionals

An analysis of counterfactuals in Warlpiri, an Australian language that does not use its past tense morphology to express counterfactuals, is argued to support Sabine Iatridou's (2000) morphosemantic analysis of counterfactuality, which analyzes the English past tense marker as an underspecified morpheme bearing an exclusion feature that either excludes the time of utterance from the topic time or the worlds of the speaker from the topic world. As the allomorph lpa of the Warlpiri imperfective morpheme is found both in the environment of past tense & in that of present counterfactual & future less vivid conditionals, where it is uninterpreted, it is concluded that Iatridou's exclusion feature is the conditioning factor for lpa. Past counterfactuals in Warlpiri are constrained by the absence of morphology that can mark the exclusion feature twice, as seen in the English past perfect. 8 References. J. Hitchcock