Non-proximal deixis as a marker of irrealis modality in Ukrainian

On the basis of a written corpus of contemporary Ukrainian, this study examines the environments in which the Ukrainian distal deictic TAM ‘there’ occurs. The analysis reveals that spatial/temporal orientation only represents one instance of a more abstract meaning of the deictic, namely, to code the conceptual distance that exists between a real-here-now and an hypothetical, unreal space. This is evidenced by the fact that TAM occurs in environments characterised by epistemic uncertainty, including modalized and negative sentences, non-declarative speech acts, indefinite expressions and exemplifying.