Realis and irrealis: Forms and concepts of the grammaticalisation of reality

Although the terms REALIS and IRREALIS are commonly used in descriptive linguistics, they are often poorly defined, and there is much confusion as to where and how they fit within syntactic theory. This paper examines the morphosyntactic characteristics and semantic properties of the realis/irrealis distinction across a number of unrelated languages, and argues for a grammatical category of reality status, which has two components, realis and irrealis, and which is intriguingly interrelated with other grammatical categories.