Counterfactual thinking is a universal cognitive process in which reality is compared to an
imagined view of what might have been. This type of reasoning is at the center of daily
operations as decision-making risk preventability or blame assignment. More generally
non-factual scenarios have been defined as a crucial ingredient of desire and modern love. If
the areas covered by this reasoning are so varied the L2 learner will be led to express 'what
might have been' at some point of her acquisitional itinerary. How is this reasoning expressed
in French Spanish and Italian? By the use of what lexical syntactic and grammatical devices?
Will the learner combine these devices as the native French speakers do? What are the L1
features likely to fossilize in the L2 grammar? What are the information principles governing a
communicative task based on the production of counterfactual scenarios? These are some of the
questions addressed by the present volume.
