Counterfactual conditionals and focus

Abstract

This article deals with the semantics of so-called mismatched two-past counterfactual conditionals exemplified by “If his son had been born tomorrowF (instead of yesterday), John would have been ecstatic.” The antecedent of this conditional is a past perfect, but posits a fictitious situation in the future of the utterance time. I argue that a focused future temporal adverbial (e.g. tomorrow) in the antecedent is associated with covert instead and that this yields the desired interpretation. The future adverbial is contrasted with a covert past adverbial (e.g. yesterday), which justifies the use of the past perfect in the antecedent. A formal proposal presented here is based on Kratzer (1981) and Rooth (1985, 1996).