Parallel Composition of Counterfactuals and Weak Modals Cross-linguistically

The role of pastness in expressing non-reals is an old puzzle - why do languages so frequently repurpose a specific temporal description to express extratemporal events? European languages frequently invoke past-like morphology when forming (some kinds of) conditionals: Spanish expresses both wishes and counterfactual conditionals with the imperfect subjunctive, French combines a conditional auxiliary verb with devoir ("ought") to mean "should," and so on.

Languages with tense will tend to use it when forming both counterfactuals (CFs) and ought/should (weak necessity) modals (WNMs); if a language lacks PAST but has FUTURE, it will use future to express counterfactuals, and WNMs will be similar. Literal pastness does not explain why WOULD looks like SHOULD or OUGHT in so many languages, but crosslinguistic evidence indicates that at least two ingredients underlie certain weak modalities and counterfactuals.

This leads to my two ideas: (1) both CFs and WNMs are basically composed of the same features of (a) temporal/causal ordering and (b) event distancing, which separates the hypothetical from the real, and (2) that pastness in most well-studied languages is a proxy for a deep semantic unit that generates equivalent meanings across languages, but not necessarily with pastness. Mapudungun (Chile) and Kimaragang (Malaysia) bring these features to the surface by composing a tense-aspect marker with a frustrative -modifiers (like prefixes and suffixes), independently found in many unrelated languages, that entail or imply cancellation of outcome, non-completion, or just irrelevance of the verb-event.

Frustratives are frequently misidentified, under-described, bridge analytic categories of aspect and modality, and strongly associate with CF/WN morphology.

Analyses in both linguistics and philosophy have historically underused less-studied languages with radically noneuropean structures. This project promises not only to improve the whole picture of how WNMs relate to CFs, but also add to knowledge of the cognitive devices that underlie the grammatical expression of nonreal events, a fundamental expressive property of natural language.

Mapudungun (Chile) is the ideal first case-study. It has a future - nonfuture tense alignment, so explicit pastness is expressively unavailable, and it uses a compound -a-fu- for both conditional consequents and WNMs, which is composed of futurate suffix -a- and frustrative (DCT) suffix -fu-. This composition is cross-linguistically unusual and an ideal exemplar for examining the in(ter)dependence of time and (im)possibility in relating WNMs to conditionals.

I would first diagnose the precise semantics and derive a mechanism for explaining the Mapudungun phenomenon.