How Close Is a Close Counterfactual? The Avertive and Its Tense-Aspect-Modality Interface
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1610.07Keywords:
avertive, counterfactuality, proximative, non-realization, tense-aspect-modality interfaceAbstract
The avertive is a semantically elaborate grammatical category encoding events that were on the verge of occurring but did not materialize. Its definition scope, determined by event types and contextual factors, distinguishes the broad-sense avertive from the narrow-sense variant, which takes counterfactual almost as its prototype. Avertive meaning emerges from the interaction of three dimensions: aspectually, it specifies the interrupted stage of event realization (the full event, preparatory stage, inner stage, or result stage); temporally, it requires past-tense anchoring to provide the necessary hindsight perspective; and modally, it encodes polarity reversal, whereby a positive construal of an event results in negative actualization. This tense-aspect-modality interface constitutes the distinctive semantic composition of the avertive, distinguishing it from related categories through the integration of aspectual imminence, past temporal anchoring, and counterfactual polarity reversal.
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