[Lingtyp] FYI: monograph on counterfactuals and avertives

[Ezra la Roi]

Dear typologists,
This announcement is aimed at those typologists in this list who may be interested in a corpus-based (diachronic) typology of counterfactual and avertive constructions, and discussion of their synchronic and diachronic interaction with TAM systems. My monograph is published with Brill in the series Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory (cover blurb and link below). Copies of the book for your university or personal library can be ordered easily through the Brill website.
The Life Cycles of Counterfactuals in the History of Greek: Aspect, Modality and Typology  (Brill, 2025)
We constantly refer to counterfactual events—things that didn’t happen but could have—through conditional, wish, and modal constructions. Yet, despite their ubiquity, we still know surprisingly little about how these constructions have evolved across languages and through history. This book breaks new ground by tracing, for the first time, the development of counterfactual systems across different constructions, texts, linguistic registers, and historical stages. Drawing on extensive corpus data from Indo-European languages and nearly three millennia of Greek, it offers the first unified account of counterfactual and avertive constructions as core expressions of non-realization. In doing so, it also proposes a revised model of the counterfactual life cycle—one that integrates semantic, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic dimensions—providing typologists with a powerful framework for exploring how counterfactual expressions evolve across languages.
[In response to the interesting recent thread “Should we include original scripts for examples in typological publications”: I have used graphemic transliteration of the Greek letters into matching ones from the Latin alphabet for maximum accessibility]

All the best,

Ezra

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Dr. Ezra la Roi

Greek, Romance and Indo-European linguistics

https://www.ezralaroi.com/

FWO junior postdoc Ghent University

Lecturer Linguistic Typology KU Leuven

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la Roi, E. 2025. The Life Cycles of Counterfactuals in the History of Greek: Aspect, Modality and Typology<https://brill.com/display/title/73566>. Brill.
[X]<https://brill.com/display/title/73566>


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