CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Noriko Akatsuka ( East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA), March 14, 2003.

"The Co-Construction of Counterfactual Reasoning revisited : A Study in Modality and Mental Spaces"

This is an inquiry into the ordinary usage of counterfactual reasoning in everyday life. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of Akatsuka (1977) and Akatsuka and Strauss (2000) this topic has remained virtually unexplored in the domain of linguistics and related disciplines. Our major research question will be: When do we typically invoke counterfactual reasoning, and why? Using the data collected in Japanese, Korean, and English by Iwasaki, Kawanishi, and Strauss, respectively, just following 1994 Northridge earthquake, I hope to show how and to what degree a qualitative cross-linguistic analysis of counterfactual reasoning can shed light on the critical role of the speaker's evaluative stance of desirability, DESIRABLE/UNDESIRABLE, in understanding the inherent relationship between counterfactuality and everyday human existence. I will begin this inquiry into counterfactual reasoning by critically examining Fauconnier's (1985) theory of mental spaces as one current view on counterfactuals. I will systematically demonstrate that Fauconnier's theory fails to provide a successful framework for analyzing the inherent relationship between counterfactuals and human emotions due to its fundamental lack of concern about the speaker's intentions in the use of counterfactuals.