Hello Bruce,

Monday, April 16, 2001, 5:01:54 PM, you wrote:

BD> larry,

BD> In those I've checked there is nothing I can find mentioning such
BD> a word as "irrealis." Perhaps it just came spontaneously out of
BD> the recesses of my mind in response to "give me a latinate word
BD> for the unreal."

I understood it "spontaneously", not being much of a Latin scholar.

Here is it at :

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/glossary/

irrealis modality

Definition

Irrealis modality is a modality that connotes that the proposition
with which it is associated is nonactual or nonfactual.

And:

http://www.unm.edu/~jbybee/mechanis.htm

Joan Bybee at the University of New Mexico will keep you busy with
"An essay on irrealis as a grammatical category" at her very
attractively designed web site with a dash of Southwest.



Alta Vista turned up 1399 hits for irrealis so quite a few people out
there seem to be suffering from spontaneous grammatical term
generation syndrom (SOGTEGS).

Omar

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