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The Life Cycles of Counterfactuals in the History of Greek : Aspect, Modality and Typology /
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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.
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1 online resource (296 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004749931
A philosophy of the possible : modalities in thought and culture /
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In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities (the actual, possible, and necessary), as applied to the discourse of philosophy in its post-Kantian and especially post-Derridean perspectives. He relies on his own experience of living in the USSR and the US, dominated respectively by imperative and possibilist modalities. Possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its multiple possibilities, inviting counterfactual and conditional modes of description. The author focuses on the creative potentials of possibilistic thinking and its heuristic value. The book demonstrates the range of modal approaches to society, culture, ethics, and language, and outlines potentiology as a new philosophical discipline interacting with ontology and epistemology.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004398344 :
0929-8436 ;