| Abstract: A counterfactual expression describes a situation that differs from another one that is factually true. Grammatically, they have a conditional form in subjunctive mode (e.g., 'If you had turned right, we would not be lost'), and are ubiquitous in everyday and scientific language. Within psychology, they have been studied and explained by nonbehavioral psychologists. In the present paper, I propose a starting point towards a behavioral view. In the conceptual aspect, I argue that counterfactual expressions cannot be readily placed within any behavioral theory of language. In the empirical aspect, I describe an exploratory study to determine the extent to which high-school students can understand a wide variety of counterfactual expressions. Participants were given a questionnaire consisting of 24 hypothetical everyday-life stories of various lengths (between 30 and 90 words), followed by multiple-choice items whose question stem was the antecedent of a counterfactual and whose alternatives were different possible consequents. The task was to choose the correct consequent for each story. Participants answered correctly in most of the stories, although they made more errors in downward counterfactuals (which describe situations that are worse than actuality). To finish, I propose some general guidelines for future studies. |