Tense-Aspect-Modality in a Second Language

Counterfactuality is a semantic subdomain of irreality (Pietrandrea 2010) which results from the comparison of reality to an imagined view of what might have been (Kahneman & Tversky 1982). Previous studies have shown that simple clauses containing the conditional tense are frequently used by native speakers of French to express irreality (Hellberg 1971; Repiso 2013). This use corresponds to the grammatical description of the conditional tense, which is said to mark the posteriority of a pro