Morphological notes on the Old Chinese counterfactual

The claim that Chinese had neither unambiguous, nor obligatory syntactic or morphological markers of counterfactuality, which has loomed large with philosophers of language, sinologists, and cognitive psychologists during the better part of the 20th century, is reviewed here from a diachronic and typological perspective, focussing on Old Chinese (OC). In contradistinction from the cross-linguistically widespread use of past-tense morphology or, less commonly, of dissociative spatial markers, the predominant strategy to mark counterfactuals in OC was ‘direct’ assertion in the protasis. It made use of a non-indicative copula marked for stativity by prefixation, which acts as a complementizer vis-à-vis the dependent clause. Morphological analysis, building upon advances in the reconstruction of OC phonology in Jacques (2000), suggests that OC combined this non-indicative copula with a causative morpheme (*s-) to encode concessives and with an existential negative (*ma-) to express a non-facultative negative counterfactual, surfacing as wēi 微 (“if it be not that...”). Straightforward “positive” counterfactuality could also be expressed through conjunction compounding in late Classical and Medieval Chinese, or by the use of simple superordinate verbs such as shǐ 使 or lìng 令. Morphologically, these share the property of being derived from the underlying verb base by causative or deontic prefixes, but CF interpretation also depends on the interplay with schetic markers and pragmatic embedding in the remainder of the sentence. Non-obligatory marking of counterfactuals thus emerges as a preference, not as a categorical incapacity, while the choice of ‘direct’ assertion, rather than temporal or distal implicatures to convey it, is unrelated to the richness of morphology in a given language