The Semantics of the Counterfactual Complementizer Law in Makkan Arabic

This paper examines counterfactual (CF) structures in Makkan Arabic, a dialect spoken in the Western region of Saudi Arabia. It expands the study of CF structures beyond English. It also presents novel data highlighting the presence of a CF complementizer law that is lexically specified to invoke counterfactuality. The CF law interacts with past tense and perfect aspect in embedded propositions, contributing to ongoing debates in semantics about whether the past tense in such contexts is "fake" or "real." Within the framework of possible worlds semantics, the CF complementizer law enters the computation with a universal operator (∀) that quantifies over all CF worlds. The past tense morphology within the embedded proposition, headed by law, triggers a process called "back-shifting." This process ensures that the events in the CF worlds share the same past as the event in the actual world. The universal operator (∀) not only quantifies over all CF worlds but also over time, indicating that the CF worlds are historically similar to the actual world up to the moment of the utterance. Thus, this study highlights the intricate interaction between the complementizer law, tense, and aspect in Makkan Arabic, contributing new insights to cross-linguistic discussions on counterfactuality. KEYWORDS Arabic counterfactuals, counterfactual conditionals, fake past, past tense, perfect aspect, real past