The Nature of Irreality in the Past Domain: Evidence from Past Intentional Constructions in Australian Languages*

Abstract

This study investigates an unusual pattern of mood marking found in the past-tense counterparts of purposive and apprehensive complex sentences in some Australian languages. The secondary clause in these constructions, which will be called past intentional constructions, is typically marked for mood even though the event described is often known to have taken place, and in some cases the mood markers have counterfactual meanings even though the constructions as such do not have any counterfactual meaning. It is argued that past intentional constructions can be defined on the basis of a combination of two features: (1) mood marking in the secondary clause, which adduces a semantic feature of (un)desirability; and (2) a link of this mood to the agent of the main clause, which creates a relation of intended or avoided realization between the main clause and the secondary clause. This analysis can help both to motivate the presence of mood marking in these constructions, and to explain the apparently unmotivated use of mood markers with counterfactual meaning, which is shown to be a cancellable implicature rather than a basic meaning of the mood markers in question. In addition, the analysis also suggests that purposive, apprehensive and past intentional constructions constitute a formally and functionally intermediate category between constructions of speech and thought representation and constructions of adverbial modification.