Conférence: The Diamond of Irrealis: Disjunctions to Questions to Conditionals

This talk explores how disjunctions, questions, and conditionals — often treated as distinct — show deep formal and semantic overlap across languages. By examining these constructions through a cross-linguistic and typological lens, I propose a unified framework, the “Diamond of Irrealis,” to capture their shared modal and alternative-sensitive nature.

Disjunctions (“or”-statements), polar/alternative questions, and conditionals (“if”-clauses) are typically analyzed as separate constructions. However, many languages show that their boundaries are far more porous than expected — morphologically, syntactically, and semantically. In this talk, I propose a typologically grounded framework called the "Diamond of Irrealis", which maps the space of these constructions according to their treatment of alternatives, speaker commitment, and modality. Drawing from both formal semantics and cross-linguistic patterns, I argue that these constructions are not coincidentally similar but form a natural class within the broader landscape of irrealis expressions. The goal is to rethink how we categorize and analyze such forms — not by surface function (e.g. ‘question’ vs. ‘condition’) but by their shared logical and pragmatic core. The talk will highlight data from a range of languages and discuss implications for both semantic theory and typology. This is an idea still in development, and audience feedback is welcome!

Info

Jour: 2025-05-16
Début: 11:20
Durée: 00:25
Salle: GWZ 2.216
Fil: Semantics
Langue: en

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