Editing Counterfactual conditional (section)

==== Formal analyses ====

In [[formal semantics (linguistics)|formal semantics]] and [[philosophical logic]], fake past is regarded as a puzzle, since it is not obvious why so many unrelated languages would repurpose a tense [[morpheme]] to mark counterfactuality. Proposed solutions to this puzzle divide into two camps: ''past as modal'' and ''past as past''. These approaches differ in whether or not they take the past tense's core meaning to be about time.<ref name="schulz14">{{cite journal |last1=Schulz |first1=Katrin |date=2014 |title=Fake tense in conditional sentences: A modal approach. |journal= Natural Language Semantics  |volume=22 |issue=2|pages=117–144 |doi=10.1007/s11050-013-9102-0 |s2cid=32680902 }}</ref><ref>{{cite encyclopedia |last1=Starr |first1=Will |editor-last1=Zalta |editor-first1=Edward N.|encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|title=Supplement to "Counterfactuals": Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals|year=2019 |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/conditionals.html}}</ref>

In the ''past as modal approach'', the [[denotation]] of the past tense is not fundamentally about time. Rather, it is an [[underspecification|underspecified]] skeleton which can apply either to [[modality (natural language)|modal]] or temporal content.<ref name="ingredients" /><ref name="schulz14" /><ref name="mackay19">{{cite journal |last1=Mackay |first1=John |date=2019 |title= Modal interpretation of tense in subjunctive conditionals |url=https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.12.2 |journal= Semantics and Pragmatics |volume=12 |issue=2|pages=1–29 |doi=10.3765/sp.12.2 |doi-access=free }}</ref> For instance, the particular past as modal proposal of Iatridou (2000), the past tense's core meaning is what is shown schematically below:

# The [[topic (linguistics)|topic]] ''x'' is not the contextually-provided ''x''

Depending on how this denotation [[compositionality|composes]], ''x'' can be a time interval or a [[possible world]]. When ''x'' is a time, the past tense will convey that the sentence is talking about non-current times, i.e. the past. When ''x'' is a world, it will convey that the sentence is talking about a potentially non-actual possibility. The latter is what allows for a counterfactual meaning.

The ''past as past approach'' treats the past tense as having an inherently temporal denotation. On this approach, so-called fake tense is not actually fake. It differs from "real" tense only in how it takes [[scope (formal semantics)|scope]], i.e. which component of the sentence's meaning is shifted to an earlier time. When a sentence has "real" past marking, it discusses something that happened at an earlier time; when a sentence has so-called fake past marking, it discusses possibilities that were [[accessibility relation|accessible]] at an earlier time but may no longer be.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Arregui |first1=Ana |date=2007 |title= When aspect matters: the case of would-conditionals |journal= Natural Language Semantics |volume=15 |issue=3 |pages=221–264 |doi=10.1007/s11050-007-9019-6 |s2cid=121835633 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ippolito |first1=Michela |date=2003 |title= Presuppositions and implicatures in counterfactuals |journal= Natural Language Semantics |volume=11 |issue=2 |pages=145–186 |doi=10.1023/A:1024411924818 |s2cid=118149259 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Khoo |first1=Justin |date=2015 |title= On Indicative And Subjunctive Conditionals |url=https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/on-indicative-and-subjunctive-conditionals.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0015.032;format=pdf |journal=Philosophers' Imprint |volume=15}}</ref>