~ 169 ~ Declerck, Renaat & Susan Reed. 2006. Tense and time in counterfactual conditionals. In: Bert Cornillie and Nicole Delbecque (eds.) Topics in Subjectification and Modalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Special issue of Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 20). 169–192. Tense and time in counterfactual conditionals RENAAT DECLERCK & SUSAN REED (K.U.Leuven - campus Kortrijk) 1. Introductory remarks 1 To keep the discussion within manageable proportions we will only consider ‘canonical conditionals’ (Declerck and Reed 2001: 59), i.e. conditionals of the logical form ‘if P, (then) Q’ which show the typical tense combinations illustrated by (1a–c): (1) a. If your parents are present at tonight’s meeting, they will disagree with your suggestion. (pattern 1) b. If your parents were present, they would disagree with your suggestion. (pattern 2) c. If your parents had been present, they would have disagreed with your suggestion. (pattern 3) As far as these formal patterns (tense patterns) are concerned, there is not a simple one-to-one relationship between form and meaning: Declerck (2000) distinguishes between thirty-nine different interpretations that can be conveyed by one or more of these three formal patterns. It follows that we will be using the terms ‘pattern 1, ‘pattern 2’ and ‘pattern 3’ to refer to conditionals of a particular form, irrespective of their meanings. A conditional (sentence) has a counterfactual meaning if the conditional clause creates a suppositional ‘possible world’ which is assumed to be contrary to the actual world. As illustrated by (1b–c), both pattern 2 and pattern 3 conditionals can be counterfactual. A general condition for a pattern 2 conditional to receive a counterfactual interpretation is that the if-clause refers 1. This article was written within a project sponsored both by the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen and by the Onderzoeksfonds of the University of Leuven (K.U.Leuven).