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In English, the "simple past" form of a verb can sometimes be used to convey irrealis meanings, without any preterite sense:

  1. If I was rich, I'd buy a Porsche.
  2. If you only knew!
  3. I wish I was there with you.
  4. I'd like to be able to say that he wrote brilliant poetry, but he doesn't.
  5. It's time you went to sleep.

I can think of several other languages that do this, including French ("si j'étais riche..."), Ancient Greek, and Modern Hebrew. In languages that have an aspect distinction, it seems to be specifically the imperfective past tense that does this.

Three questions:

  1. What is the specific set of irrealis contexts (e.g. counterfactual conditionals, etc.) in which past-tense forms can be used in English, and how does it differ from that of other languages that have this conflation? For example, in Hebrew, the conditional examples 1-3 above would be translated with a past-tense verb, but example 4 would need a present form and 5 a future.
  2. How widespread is this phenomenon? What other languages do this? Is it a European or Indo-European thing, or is it broader than that? (Hebrew is neither of these, of course, but Modern Hebrew got much of its syntax and idiom from European languages, so could have borrowed this.)
  3. What is the basis for this syncretism? Past and irrealis seem to have nothing in common; if anything, it would make more sense to line up past with realis and future with irrealis. Imperfective and irrealis maybe have a little more in common in that neither expresses a specific, single, real event, but this still doesn't seem like much. Given that this is a recurrent pattern across several languages, is there a cognitive reason for it?
TKR
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    In English the 'simple past' form is perfective, not imperfective. – StoneyB on hiatus Apr 19 '14 at 12:44
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    @StoneyB Not necessarily - it depends on the Aktionsart of the verb. "He was a writer" would be translated by an imperfect form in languages that have a morphologically marked perfective/imperfective opposition. – TKR Apr 19 '14 at 17:19
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    Russian uses past forms with ‘бы’ for irrealis, but both perfective and imperfective aspect are possible. – neubau Apr 20 '14 at 12:58
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    @TKR Well, yes; but that's no more than to say that English aspect and Aktionsart are fluid. The 'default' reading of the simple past is perfective, it contrasts with the imperfect progressive construction; and in context even pure statives may be cast as perfective with the simple past: He loved many women. – StoneyB on hiatus Apr 21 '14 at 15:26
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    Have you read Suzanne Fleischman's 1995 paper "Imperfective and irrealis" in Modality in Grammar and Discourse, eds. J. L. Bybee and S. Fleischman? It may be a good place to start with. – Alex B. Apr 24 '14 at 02:09
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    shouldn't it be if I *were* rich? – user58955 Apr 24 '14 at 08:31
  • @AlexB. I hadn't known of that reference, thanks! I'll hunt it up. – TKR Apr 24 '14 at 17:32
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    @user58955 If I were rich (with past subjunctive) is the older and prescriptively favored construction, but at least in informal usage the subjunctive is very often replaced by an indicative these days. – TKR Apr 24 '14 at 17:35
  • Dutch has this too, just like English: als ik rijk was = if I were rich. Note that the aorist forms can also be used for the irrealis in Greek, often with a pluperfect-kind-of meaning. In Latin, the past tenses can also be used to express the irrealis (including the perfect, I believe). There is some evidence that Proto-Indo-European had a connection between epistemic distance (farther from the truth) and temporal distance (farther into the past), which kind of makes sense when you think about it. – Cerberus May 16 '14 at 02:50
  • @Cerberus: Good point about the Greek aorist. For Latin, are you referring to subjunctive or indicative forms? If the former, it isn't really the kind of conflation I'm talking about. Past indicative in the protasis does seem to exist in Latin, but I think it's rare. – TKR May 16 '14 at 03:38
  • @TKR: Nope, indicative, or they would indeed not be relevant. The imperfect/pluperfect subjunctive is far more common, but I would not say the indicatives are rare; I see them enough. – Cerberus May 16 '14 at 04:23
  • @Cerberus Do you have any examples handy, by any chance? In Gildersleeve and Lodge sec. 297 I find just one example (Cicero) Ipsam tibi epistulam misissem, nisi tam subito fratris puer proficiscebatur. But that seems to be only very faintly irrealis, so to speak; nisi there basically means sed (as G&S point out). – TKR May 16 '14 at 22:05
  • @TKR: I'm not sure how that irrealis is "weak"? The proposition your brother's boy did not leave so suddenly is the opposite of true. For more examples: http://books.google.nl/books?id=yJEGToQ1DaYC&pg=PA410&lpg=PA410&dq=kuhner+stegmann+irrealis+imperfect&source=bl&ots=Ff36DEURn7&sig=Ze31Nes6dvDxQbz5z5rdC03_Ors&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7bV2U7vjLcmYPezIgKgI&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=kuhner%20stegmann%20irrealis%20imperfect&f=false — melius fuit perisse illo interfect...quam haec videre (Cicero, Ad Atticum). – Cerberus May 17 '14 at 01:13
  • P.S. It is possible that such indicatives verbs are used in certain kinds of situations, possibly more limited in kind than those of the subjunctive irrealis; but it is the irrealis nonetheless. Oh, and I recommend Kühner-Stegmann and Hofmann-Szantyr for the most comprehensive Latin grammar—or at least that's what we always use. – Cerberus May 17 '14 at 01:30
  • @Cerberus Thanks for the link. I'm still not totally sure any of those examples are as clearly irrealis as what you see in Greek: you could argue that the debere examples are about what was actually necessary at the time, even if it didn't happen, and similarly for Cicero's fuit (perisse was better than vivere, even though it wasn't what happened). In that sense it's actually the English irrealis that's illogical in such cases, arguably. Not sure about Petronius's longum erat. Anyway, yes, I should consult the standard grammars (rather than G&S, which is what I have at home...). – TKR May 17 '14 at 01:38
  • @TKR: One thing to consider is that many of those indicative imperfects are accompanied by subjunctive imperfects, which indicates that the situation as a whole is counterfactual. Perhaps there is a subtle difference, but if anything I would call most of those examples irrealis. – Cerberus May 17 '14 at 01:50
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    Japanese used to have a distinction between irrealis (hypothetical) and realis (given) conditions: nom-a-ba "if I drink…" vs. nom-e-ba "since I drink…" "when I drink…". Later, the first form was lost, merging with the second, which now carries the two meanings. This reminds me somewhat of English losing the subjunctive and using the preterite form for both. – melissa_boiko Apr 21 '17 at 11:39
  • I don't believe 4 is like your first 3 examples. You can replace wrote with writes with no change of meaning, and you can't replace it with a subjunctive. There is no literal irrealis - the literal meaning is that the speaker really would like to say... I am not sure about 5 either. The meaning is that it really is time for you to go to sleep - this doesn't really involve envisaging a situation where you are already asleep. If there's an irrealis here, it's of a different kind. –  May 28 '19 at 07:32
  • I also disagree that it would make more sense to line up past with realis and future with irrealis. The future is unknown so to use a future tense implies that something may yet turn out to be the case, whereas the point is to convey that it is not the case. Since the past is known, the use of a past tense to state something that is known not to be the case can only be an irrealis use, and there will not usually be any danger of confusing it with a mistaken statement about the past. –  May 28 '19 at 07:35
  • It seems to me this use makes enough sense that it could easily develop in parallel, and is not necessarily a feature that has been inherited. –  May 28 '19 at 07:36

4 Answers4

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I suspect subjunctive merged with indicative in English simply due to phonetical reasons. Look at Old English:

"I ate" (indicative) - Ic æt

"I ate" (subjunctive) - Ic æte

or

"we beat" (indicative) - bēoton

"we beat" (subjunctive) - bēoten

(according to wiktionary)

Then vowel reduction happened, and unstressed vowels in affixes all turned into schwas or zero, it's not surprising that forms like bēoton and bēoten merged into one single "beat" both for simple past and subjunctive, as it is today.

I also looked at Proto-Germanic, and subjunctive forms differ from indicative forms there only slightly too:

"you did" (indicative) - *dedēz

"you did" (subjunctive) - *dēdīz

or

"he did" (indicative) - *dedē

"he did" (subjunctive) - *dēdī

It was just bound to collapse phonetically, all those endings eventually collapse into schwas in Germanic languages due to the fact that Germanic languages have strong expiratory stress closer to the beginning of a word.

If you look at "to be", then you can see a pattern that still survives today to an extent:

"I was" (indicative) - Ic wæs

"I were" (subjunctive) - Ic wǣre

Was/were still survives to this day, because there was no phonetical collapse like above (thanks to rhotacism wǣse > wǣre between vowels). And, obviously, modern "if I was" is just analogical, because 99% other verbs do not tell between subj. and indicative.

Constantine Geist
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For most Romance languages at least, there's a totally separate set of conjugation forms called the "subjunctive mode", used to indicate things that could/should/might be, could/should/might become, or that somebody wishes they did as opposed to the "indicative mode" which usually indicates stuff the way it is. Usually, subjunctive present has nothing to do with indicative past, nor subjunctive past with indicative past perfect.

Even French does this, except its imperfect doubles work as a kind of subjunctive after conditional "Si" (If). So you do can say "Si j'étais riche" but you must say "Quand je sois riche" for "Quand j'étais riche" implies you have already been rich, but aren't anymore.

Problem with English is that over time its subjunctive present has mostly merged with indicative past, subj. past with ind. past perfect and so on. Only exception is verb "to be" in formal settings, which goes "if I were you" and "I wish he were a writer" (which both change to "was" in colloquial settings - apparently native speakers can't resist regularizing the conjugation pattern).

Latin future tense disappeared in the Vulgar form of the language, reappearing in Middle Ages by using verb "to have" as an auxiliary: "Yo iré" comes from "Yo ir he" (literally "I to go have"), same happened in French with "J'amerai", Italian "Io parleró", etc. Don't know much about proto-Germanic but at least English evolved in a similar way using "to have" or "to shall" for the future. So even if native speakers did feel an affinity between irrealis and the future, the lack of a grammatical future tense most probably stopped such merge to happen.

Joe Pineda
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    "If I were you" is past subjunctive; present subjunctive in English is things like "So be it" or "It's necessary that he go". – TKR Apr 20 '14 at 16:10
  • @TKR you got me thinking. Have to agree "so be it", etc. are subjunctive present. At least in Spanish equivalent of "If I were you" would require a subjunctive imperfect (had to check table at http://www.wordreference.com/conj/EsVerbs.aspx?v=ser) rather than subjunctive present. So now I'm tempted to call the conjugation of "I wish he knew about this" the subjunctive imperfect of English, but I might be incorrectly projecting the artifacts of my natal tongue onto it. Ideas? – Joe Pineda Apr 23 '14 at 03:16
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    Traditionally, things like "I wish he were" have simply been called past subjunctive in English, since English doesn't mark perfectivity morphologically. I believe the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language uses different terminology for this form and maybe also for the present subjunctive, but I don't have it handy to check. – TKR Apr 23 '14 at 16:12
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    Joe Pineda uses "quand je 'sois' riche" which is NOT grammatical. Maybe he was thinking of Something like 'Que je sois riche ou non cela ne les concerne pas.' – Annie CHABOT Mar 05 '17 at 14:10
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If I could address the Semitic part of your question: the Arabic past tense (al-māḍī; please note that this word actually does mean “past”) is used in principal clauses for actions in the past time, but is also used with the particle “law” in unreal conditions. So at least in your first two sentences you would say “law kuntu” and “law kunta”. So this is not a purely Indo-European thing.

fdb
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At least in my dialect of Spanish (Rioplatense) sometimes the imperfect past tense is used instead of both the subjunctive and the potential in conditional sentences (as exemplified below). This is colloquial and I'm sure many people would view it as ungrammatical, but is used often enough.

Si sabía no te decía.

  • Literally: "If I knew, I didn't tell you" (both imperfect, maybe rather like "If I was knowing, I wasn't telling you").
  • Actual meaning: "If I had known, I wouldn't have told you."
  • "Correct" form: "Si hubiese sabido no te habría dicho."

Si me iba hace cinco minutos no me enteraba.

  • Literally: "If I went five minutes ago, I didn't learn of it."
  • Actual meaning: "If I'd gone away five minutes ago, I wouldn't have learned of it."
  • "Correct" form: "Si me hubiese ido hace cinco minutos no me habría enterado."

I've heard the same kind of construction in Brazilian Portuguese but I'm not confident enough about their usage.

pablodf76
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