Rajesh Bhatt, University of Pennsylvania/MIT
This paper intends to account for certain generalizations about counterfactual morphology in the modern Indo-Aryan languages (henceforth MIA). It discusses the means of marking counterfactuality in MIA, develops a typology of counterfactuals in MIA, and extends the formal analysis of the semantic contribution of tense-aspect morphology developed in Iatridou (1996, 1997). The generalizations discussed are: 1. The imperfective participle is an ingredient of the morphology in counterfactuals in many modern Indo-Aryan language. 2. In a counterfactual environment, the imperfective participle does not contribute its usual set of interpretations. 3. There is no periphrastic tense marking (such as the Hindi hai/thaa `Prs/Pst') in the counterfactual. If a language uses periphrastic tense markers with the imperfective participle to form the present/past habitual, it does not use them to form the counterfactual.