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Conditionals and the epistemic scale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Noriko Akatsuka
Noriko Akatsuka*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

The conceptual domains REALIS and IRREALIS form an epistemic scale representing a speaker's subjective evaluation of the reality of a given situation. This scale accounts for grammatical phenomena such as conditionals, Japanese complementizer choice, and ‘evidential’ in Turkish, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. Conditionals are identifiable not by their syntactic forms, but by speaker attitudes within the IRREALIS division of the scale. Surprise is also an IRREALIS phenomenon, since it takes time for newly-learned information to be assimilated into one's established body of knowledge.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , September 1985 , pp. 625 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This paper is a product of a long-range research project on ‘subjectivity and grammar’. (I use ‘subjectivity’ in the sense of Benveniste 1971.) Earlier versions were presented at the Symposium of Japanese Discourse Analysis, July 1981, Middlebury College; the Annual Meeting of Teachers of Japanese, April 1982, University of Chicago; and the Workshop on Conditionals, May 1982, Stanford University.

The gestation period of this paper lasted several years. It is therefore impossible to acknowledge all the people who have contributed in some way to its final form. However, I wish to mention four individuals whose moral support came miraculously at different critical stages: Peter Strawson, Haj Ross, Susumu Kuno, and Sandy Thompson. I am also grateful to Robert Epp and William Rogers for their editorial assistance, as well as much helpful criticism.

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