Abstracts
Katrin Schulz (ILLC, Amsterdam)
"Fake Tense as structural metaphor"
Many languages show a phenomenon called fake tense: their past tense marker can occur in certain construction without conveying pastness in any obvious way. What all of these languages seem to have in common is that fake tense occurs in subjunctive or counterfactual conditional sentences. In this talk I will present an approach that explain fake tense in conditional sentences as a structural metaphor: the past tense marker develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The approach will be spelled out in the semantic framework of (von Stechow 2009) and (Heim&Kratzer 1998).