Universal Parameters yielding Counterfactuals

This paper presents a set of non-language-specific principles yielding counterfactual thinking that has been previously outlined by psychologists (Kahneman & Tversky 1982, Kahneman & Miller 1986, Miller & Gunasegaram 1990, Summerville & Roese 2008, Dray & Uphill 2009). The application of these regularities to if-clauses narrows a specific type of constructions –i.e., heuristic counterfactuals– whose semantic properties remain static across languages, resulting in the following description: [+] Restrictedness, [-] Reality status, [-] Probability, and [-] Counterfactual factuality.