Counterfactual conditionals: Linguistic variation in Italian and beyond

The aim of this paper is to integrate the analysis of the intra-linguistic variation attested in the coding of counterfactual conditionals in spoken Italian with a larger cross-linguistic perspective. We start by providing a sociolinguistically- informed discussion of the counterfactual conditional strategies attested in spoken Italian, through a corpus-based analysis. After describing the corpus and the parameters of analysis, we provide a typology of the attested constructions, based on the verbal forms employed for protasis and apodosis, showing that the observed variation goes beyond the representations available in the literature. In particular, we describe the spread of counterfactual imperfective past indicative forms, which are especially frequent in symmetrical constructions and are argued to be associated to lower educational achievements and, to a lesser extent, to informal contexts. We then consider the picture of Italian counterfactual conditionals within a wider perspective, to verify whether the patterns described for Italian follow more general tendencies. After addressing some crucial methodological issues, concerning the problems raised by the integration of a sociolinguistic and a cross-linguistic approach, we argue that Italian data are probably to be analyzed as manifestations of a widespread trend towards the use of symmetrical countefactual constructions on the one hand and the use of past habituals for functions connected to the irrealis domain on the other hand.