We are happy to announce a talk by Giuliano Armenante (Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/62660316332?pwd=94KnkxFireEQFCWBGpi35ZwrClwoLa.1
Date: October 29, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: There is more than one way to X-mark: The lesson from West Africa
Abstract: Conditionals expressing remote possibilities are often morphologically distinguished from those expressing open possibilities through specialized “X-marking” morphology (von Fintel & Iatridou 2023). This morphology includes both repurposed fake past forms (as in English) and dedicated counterfactual markers (e.g. Hungarian -nA) (Iatridou 2000). Competing modal (Mackay 2019; Schulz 2014) and temporal analyses (Arregui 2009; Ippolito 2013) have been proposed for English fake past. Recent cross-linguistic work, however, reveals a more nuanced picture, suggesting that temporal and modal contributions to X-marking can be dissociated (M. Kaufmann & Todorović 2024; S. Kaufmann 2023; Mizuno 2023).
In this talk, I contribute to this debate by presenting novel data from three Kwa languages (Niger-Congo): one tensed language, Akan, and two tenseless languages, Ga and Ewe, all of which employ dedicated X-marking. I show that (i) dedicated X-marking contributes modal expansion of the conditional’s domain of quantification in all three languages (cf. S. Kaufmann 2023; Stalnaker 1975; von Fintel & Iatridou 2023); (ii) in Akan, past tense morphology shifts either the evaluation time or the reference time of the conditional, thereby retaining its temporal contribution; and (iii) in Ga and Ewe, X-marked conditionals exhibit greater, though distinct, degrees of semantic variation.
Building on these findings, I argue that X-marking is not a uniform semantic category, but may involve modal expansion, backward temporal displacement, or both. I further show that distinguishing these contributions offers a way to reconcile recent criticisms of strictly temporal analyses (von Fintel & Iatridou 2023) with those of modal analyses of past morphology (Ippolito & Mirrazi 2026).