Hasada, Rie (1997). Conditionals and counterfactuals in Japanese. Language Sciences, 19(3), 277-288. DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00065-4
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.
