We present a novel argument from Hausa (Chadic) for the analysis of counterfactual Fake Tense as derived from a lexically underspecified EXCL-operator (Iatridou 2000). Evidence comes from the facts (i.) that Hausa has no morphosyntactic marking of tense, and (ii.) that Fake Tense in Hausa is not expressed by verbal morphology, but by a left-peripheral operator 'daa'. The analysis is cast in th...