Present counterfactuals and the indicative-subjunctive divide

Abstract

This paper aims to add to the longstanding debate on the relation between subjunctive and indicative mood in conditional sentences. In doing so, the theoretical range is narrowed down to three options, each of which takes at least one of the two moods to be presuppositional. Based on an experiment reported in (Wimmer, 2020), we take a few steps towards a competition-based analysis on which the subjunctive is vacuous (Schlenker, 2005; Leahy, 2011, 2018), contrary to its morphological markedness.