Publications
Publication details [#16831]
Hasada, Rie. 1997. Conditionals and Counterfactuals in Japanese. Language Sciences 19 (3) : 277–288. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0388-0001
Journal WWW
Annotation
This paper examines whether Anna Wierzbicka's (1996a, 1996b) hypothesis that the `conditional' and `counterfactual' constructions are semantic universals, can be justified in the case of the Japanese language.
Many Japanese constructions are compatible with both condition (IF) and temporal (WHEN) interpretation; despite this, it is shown that there is an unambiguous exponent of the IF-construction in Japanese, which uses the particle moshi. It is also shown that the English `hypothetical conditional' has an equivalent, or near-equivalent, in Japanese. As for the counterfactual, it is argued that while there is an unambiguous counterfactual in Japanese, in the form of a construction with (no)ni, this construction is not a perfect equivalent of the English counterfactual because the Japanese construction always implies that the speaker feels something bad about the real outcome.