On the non-actuality inferences in Turkish avertives

Languages have various forms of expressing implications of imminency and non-actuality. While a variety of constructions such as imperfectives, proximatives or adverbs like almost crosslinguistically imply the counterfactuality of the event in question, some languages like French and Turkish have exclusive morphemes expressing imminence while at the same time logically asserting the non-actuality of an event. This study has a particular focus on the Turkish morpheme -(y)Ayaz, which when combined with a predicate indicates that the event expressed by the predicate has not been actualized although it was close to be so. We argue that this is part of what -(y)Ayaz asserts, and provide a compositional semantics for sentences involving this morpheme. Finally, we show that our semantics sheds light on the combinatorial restrictions concerning lexical aspect and outer aspect.