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Abstract

Counterfactuality has often been equated with counterfactual conditionals (e.g. ‘If I had run, I would have been on time’). As a result, only counterfactual conditionals have been heavily studied in recent years, from different theoretical angles (e.g. formal, functional, typological). Most linguists have adopted a synchronic approach, focusing in particular on the formal (a)symmetry of protases and apodoses (e.g. Haiman & Kuteva 2002, Yong 2016, Olguín Martínez & Lester 2022) and various explanations of their TAM marking (e.g. Iatridou 2000, Karawani 2014, von Prince, Krajinović, & Krifka 2022). Yet, it has been shown in corpus-based diachronic studies that conditional and non-conditional counterfactual marking patterns (e.g. counterfactual wishes such as ‘I wish you were here’ or deontic modals such as ‘my team should have won’) are linked diachronically, for example through analogy (la Roi 2024a). Also, counterfactual constructions in Indo-European languages develop along similar developmental stages in a so-called counterfactual life cycle (la Roi 2024b, 2025a, b).

In this lecture, I therefore propose to approach counterfactuality as a system of related strategies, strategies whose development we can map with the three stages of the counterfactual life cycle. I examine how morphosyntactic typologies of counterfactual conditionals do or do not accommodate non-conditional counterfactuals (cf. Van linden & Verstraete 2008, Von Fintel & Iatridou 2023) and outline the different steps towards a corpus-based diachronic typology of counterfactuals (cf. la Roi 2025b: 265-298). Aside from data from the existing literature and reference grammars, I will discuss new evidence from a parallel corpus of New Testament translations (Mayer & Cysouw 2014), contrasting both counterfactual conditionals with non-conditional counterfactuals (e.g. counterfactual wishes and deontic modals), first within Eurasia and then beyond.

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