Actuality and fake tense in conditionals

Tense in Simple Conditionals

Tense and Aspect in Swing Conditionals

It is often assumed that French (like Greek) requires imperfective aspect as a counterfactual (CF) marker in the antecedent of PSCs (cf. e.g. [Iatridou, 2000]). This should explain why we find in the antecedent of PSCs the plus que parfait, combining imperfective morphology with a layer of perfect, cf. (1). Tenses without imperfective morphology, i.a. the passé composé (that has both simple pas...

Fake Tense in Conditional Sentences A modal approach

Many languages allow for ”fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou [2000] has coined this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional construction. This paper proposes to explain Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind...

Chance and Actuality

The relation between chance and actuality gives rise to the following puzzle. On the one hand, it may be a chancy matter what will actually happen. On the other hand, standard semantics for ‘actually’ imply that sentences beginning with ‘actually’ are never contingent. In order to elucidate this puzzle, a kind of objective semantic indeterminacy will be defended: in a chancy world, it may be a ...

Fake Variables in research

In each journal, the editorial board receives many articles but more than 70% of them are rejected. This happens because there is no real correlation among the variables in these articles or the variables and perceived relations are fake, which means playing with the variables nonexistent in reality. This rejection occurs mainly as a result of the researchers' misinterpretation of the interdisc...