Counterfactual wishing as multiple agreement

Abstract

Counterfactual (CF) wishes give rise to the wellknown puzzle that CF-marking on a desire predicate leaves the desire intact (von Fintel and Iatridou 2008, 2017). German is one of the languages that exhibits this pattern. This paper takes the desire’s intactness in German CF-wishes to speak in favor of viewing said CF-marking as semantically vacuous agreement morphology. All this morphology does is to reflect CF-displacement of a silent antecedent (vF&I 2017). The morphological pattern CF-wishes seem subject to might apply to CF-conditionals more generally.