Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Counterfactual reasoning and language in child development

Ability to entertain outcomes that conflict with the state of affairs in the real world and to discuss such outcomes using language recruits a chain of cognitive and linguistic processes in the learner. I will discuss stages in conceptual and linguistic development that the child passes on their way to achieving an adultlike state of non-verbal and verbal reasoning about counterfactuality. I will use examples of counterfactuality residing within the imperfective aspect and in sub-lexically modal verbs to propose that counterfactual semantics is non-default and must be postulated by the learner as a result of encountering some form of supporting evidence in the linguistic input.