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Expressions of prioritizing modality vary within and across languages in the criteria they can encode (rules, goals, or desires) and the directive or expressive speech acts they can perform. Crucial parameters include source of evaluation, endorsement, modal strength, and counterfactuality implicatures. Japanese 'beki' is a prioritizing modal which, unlike the better studied Indo-European modals, lacks epistemic readings and interacts with tense transparently, allowing us to isolate modal and temporal effects of past marking. 

The semantic contribution of Fake Past in counterfactual expressions has been actively debated in recent semantic literature. This study deepens our current understanding of this natural language phenomenon by digging into the behavior of Past tense in Japanese counterfactual desire reports. We show that  the Past-as-Past approach to Fake Past makes correct predictions about its semantic behavior. 

Abstract Theories of imperatives differ in how they aim to derive the distributional and functional properties of this clause type. One point of divergence is how to capture the fact that imperative utterances convey the speaker’s endorsement for the course of events described. Condoravdi & Lauer (2017) observe that conditionals with imperative consequents (conditionalized imperatives, CIs) are infelicitous as motivations of advice against doing something and take this as evidence for an analysis of imperatives as encoding speaker endorsement. We investigate CIs in further contexts and argue that their account in terms of preferential conflicts fails to capture the more general infelicity of CIs as motivations for or against doing something. We develop an alternative in which imperatives do not directly encode speaker preferences, but express modalized propositions and impose restrictions on the discourse structure (along the lines of Kaufmann, 2012). We show how this carries over to conditionalized imperatives to derive the behavior of CIs, and conclude with a discussion of more general problems regarding an implementation of conditional preferential commitments, an issue that can be avoided on our account of imperatives.