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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/