Mood and Modality (EAGL)

2012

This article started as an ordinary review of Davidsen-Nielsen’s book on tense and mood, but gradually developed into a full discussion of a number of issues that are of crucial importance to any linguistic theory. The issues in question concern the difference between mood and modality, the delimitation of the class of auxiliary verbs, the analysis of the tense system, the relation between the meaning of tense forms and the temporal interpretation of clauses as a whole, and the question of whether nonfinite verb forms can be treated as tensed. In the margin of this, some minor questions are addressed that are brought up by D’s discussion of tense and mood.

Forthcoming in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2016

We address flexible embedded mood patterns, i.e. cases where (a) the same type of verb selects indicative in one language but prefers subjunctive in another, or (b) both moods may be allowed in a single language. We focus on emotive predicates as an illustration of our approach. Emotive predicates allow subjunctive and indicative (with preference for the former) in Italian. Such flexible patterns have not been discussed much in the literature because they are problematic for existing theories which predict the facts of one language but not the other. We propose that the correct account of embedded mood choice is sensitive to both what the embedding predicate asserts and what it presupposes. We argue that mood morphemes have definedness conditions that make them sensitive to aspects of the (non)veridicality of the embedding predicate, and implement an optimality theoretic account that captures opposing tendencies in Greek and Italian.

The article focuses on correlation between mood and modality in Modern English. The relations between logical and linguistic modalities are discussed. The semantic scope of linguistic modality is established. The typology of language means used to express linguistic modality is presented. Different approaches to the category of mood as a morphological means of expressing modality are analyzed. It is argued that a two-mood system is the most reasonable one for Modern English morphology. Perspectives of further research are outlined.

Object of this study is the analysis of the Indicative and Subjunctive morphological mood marking on verbs in Italian, with some references also to other Romance languages. I claim that the occurrence of these moods triggers a presupposition of assertibility and non-assertibility of the clauses that contain them, with respect to the input context in which they are assessed. And the formal translations of these presuppositions amount to applying to an intrasentential level the considerations that Robert Stalnaker devoted to felicitous assertions: a clause counts as assertible just in case it leads to an effective elimination of possible worlds from the input context it gets added to; it results as non-assertible when it does not lead to any change or when it has as outcome the empty set. I aim at showing how these considerations can correctly account for the contribution that morphological mood marking makes for the interpretation of hypothetical statements (that is, for the meaning difference displayed by Indicative versus Subjunctive mood marked conditionals), and, moreover, how they can also predict the mood alternation in the domain of subordinated clauses (that is, for the fact that some predicates, as volitionals, select for a Subjunctive mood clause, whereas others, like verba dicendi, are usually followed by an Indicative mood subordinated clause).

The reader of the collection Modality in Contemporary English (MCE) soon realizes that Frank Palmer's introductory article is tone-setting for the collection. He provides a general terminological framework for discussing modality, clarifying the distinction between mood, modality, and modal system, and points to the syntactic and semantic difficulties in analyzing modality. For Palmer, mood denotes a binary system, corresponding to the contrast between indicative and subjunctive in classical European languages, for which he prefers the terms realis and irrealis, respectively (2). In contrast, modal systems, as typified by English, occur as a set of forms generally demarking modality that are opposed to a nonmodal (that is, unmarked) realis form. Thus, modality names a grammatical category, and there are two subcategories of modality, mood and modal system (2). Furthermore, mood and modal systems are "to a large extent" mutually exclusive, as exemplified by Modern English, where "the subjunctive mood has died out and the modal system has developed" (3). On the semantic pole, and following Lunn (1995, 430), Palmer identifies the essential feature of modality as the speaker's "assertion" versus "nonassertion" of the marked proposition (5). Crosslinguistically, modality demonstrates four types; to the traditional division found in the English modal system of epistemic, deontic, and dynamic modalities, Palmer adds a fourth, evidential modality, and reshuffles them into two groups: "propositional modality" (epistemic and evidential), which is centrally concerned with the status of the proposition, and "event modality" (deontic and dynamic), which is centrally concerned with whether the event described is controlled by circumstances external to the subject of the sentence (deontic) or by circumstances internal to the subject, as with dynamic modality (7). Of the two groups, propositional modality is more modal because it is concerned with the reasons for a proposition's nonassertion (8).

The modal variation and morpho-syntactic mismatches of imperatives have challenged model-theoretic linguists, making it hard to unify them as a notional category. Depending on specific theories, imperatives inherently contain an illocutionary operator with directive force (e.g., Han 1998, 1999a/b/c, 2001), a performative necessity modal similar to MUST/SHOULD (e.; among others). Despite the fact that imperatives cannot be simply identified with a single label of modality (i.e., necessity, possibility, deontic, bouletic, teleological etcetera), I propose that there is indeed an underlying property shared by all imperatives unifying and distinguishing them from declaratives: they contribute a nonveridical modal space. In this paper, I study imperatives in terms of nonveridicality and polar partition and argue that their semantic contribution is the presupposition of epistemic uncertainty as to the actualization of a proposition p and the creation of nonveridical modal spaces. Imperatives introduce a preference ordering between p and non-p worlds, and are analyzed as nonveridical operators conveying partial certainty and no inherent directive force. Under this perspective, it is not unexpected that imperative manifests not only as a verbal morphology, but also in the form of particles, i.e., the subjunctive imperatives with na particle in Greek, or that imperatives function modally since nonveridicality characterizes all modalities. Therefore, the dilemma whether imperatives are modals or not becomes redundant; it only matters that imperatives induce nonveridical modal spaces.

ceeol.com

Modality -a privileged space for the manifestation of the thought-speech relation -is commonly defined as the attitude of the speaker towards the propositional content of the utterance. The plural, modalities, is currently used to designate such semantic properties as: necessary, possible, likely, plausible, optional 1 . For decades, the interest in the study of modality / modalities has been shared by logicians, semioticians and linguists (see Langages 1976), with a marked tendency towards approaching the issue in a pragmatic perspective 2 . As Robert Blanché stated in his Structures intellectuelles (Paris, Vrin, 1966), the theories regarding modality have the reputation of being obscure. A medieval saying reactivated by Blanché warns: "De modalibus non gustabit asinus."

 Epistemic modals are base-generated higher than non-epistemic/root modals in the clausal structure.  Epistemic modals (Mod epis ) are higher than Tense (T), while root modals (Mod root ) are lower than T.  High modals are evaluated in the context of the speech event (i.e., with regard to the speaker at the speech time), whereas low modals are evaluated in the context of the VP event (with regard to an argument at the event time).

Building a bridge between linguistic communities of the Old and the New World, 2012

1979) considers three constraints to which every adequate account of mood should conform. And he suggests a certain paratactic analysis of sentences in various moods. In what follows here we question the adequacy of Davidson's suggestion with respect to one of the considered constraints.

Inquiry, 2019

We critically review two extant paradigms for understanding the systematic interaction between modality and tense, as well as their respective modifications designed to do justice to the contingency of time's structure and composition. We show that on either type of theory, as well as their respective modifications, some principles prove logically valid whose truth might sensibly be questioned on metaphysical grounds. These considerations lead us to devise a more general logical framework that allows accommodation of those metaphysical views that its predecessors rule out by fiat.

Functional Structure from Top to Toe, 2014

The pre-and post-verbal orders of Mood, Tense and Aspect morphemes. If we set aside for a moment certain apparent exceptions, to which we return in section 2, the preverbal order of (free or bound) mood, tense, and aspect morphemes appears to be, across languages, Mood > Tense > Aspect. 1 Postverbally, the order of the same morphemes is predominantly the mirror image of the preverbal one (namely, Aspect > Tense > Mood), a fact which recalls, modulo the head vs. phrasal status of the elements involved, Greenberg's Universal 20 on the order of demonstratives, numerals, and adjectives with respect to the noun. 2 The characteristic mirror-image relation of the preverbal and postverbal orders of mood, tense, and aspect morphemes has been raised in different frameworks to the status of a general principle. See Gerdts's (1982,193fn4) "Satellite Principle", within a Relational Grammar approach, Bybee's (1985) "Principle of Relevance", within a functional-typological approach 3 , Foley and van Valin's (1984), and Van Valin and LaPolla's (1997,46) "Principle of scope assignment", within Role and Reference Grammar, and the (generalized) "Mirror Principle", within a Principles and Parameters approach. 4 *An earlier version of this article, which I dedicate here to Tarald with friendship, was presented at the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Left Periphery in Aphasia (LPIA), Venice, April 2006. I wish to thank the participants of that event, in particular Federico Damonte and Richard Kayne, for their helpful suggestions. 1 As the term 'mood' is used in the literature to refer to different grammatical notions, corresponding to functional heads differently ordered with respect to Tense (cf. Cinque 1999,55ff, and chapter 4), I will reserve it here to speech act mood, which traditionally ranges over such values as declarative, interrogative, imperative, etc., and which is unquestionably higher than Tense. 2 Prenominally, the only order is Dem Num A, while postnominally the predominant order is A Num Dem (Greenberg 1963,87; Hawkins 1983,119). 3 Actually Bybee (1985, chapter 2) considers it a tendency rather than a rigid principle. Cf. also Foley and Van Valin (1984). 4 Baker's (1985; 1988) original Mirror Principle was in fact limited to argument (or valency) changing morphemes. It established a strict correspondence between the order in which syntactic processes affecting a verb take place and the order in which morphemes marking those processes are added to the verb. Under this view, different orders of morphemes are expected to correspond to different orders of application of the corresponding syntactic processes, and, characteristically, to different meanings. The principle was later generalized to tense and agreement inflectional morphemes (Belletti 1990) and to mood, modal, aspectual, voice, etc. morphemes (Pollock 1989, Cinque 1999, Baker 2002, 326, Julien 2002b,54f, and references cited there), and acquired the status of a rigid principle governing the relation between the order of attachment of morphemes to a verb and the order (and hierarchy) of the free functional heads corresponding to those morphemes. On the possibility that even (circumstantial) argument changing morphemes are rigidly ordered underlyingly, see Damonte (2007). We know however that in the DP the order A Num Dem (the mirror image of the prenominal order) is the predominant but not the exclusive order found postnominally, where the same order as the prenominal one is also found, albeit much less frequently (cf. the references given in fn.2, and Cinque 2005,fn.10). Moreover, Greenberg's formulation of the Universal allows for the possibility that in one and the same language some of the elements Dem Num A appear prenominally while others appear postnominally (as long as they conform to the unique prenominal order Dem Num A, and to one or the other of the two postnominal orders, A Num Dem and Dem Num A). In Cinque (2005) I reviewed other attested orders of the same elements, claiming that all of the attested ones (even those contradicting Greenberg's Universal 20), and none of the unattested ones, can in fact be derived from either not moving, or moving, the NP, alone, or within a larger phrase. 'At that time, where were you living?' (II)d (V Mood Tns Asp) 15 See, for example, (12), from Comox (Central Coast Salish-Harris 1977, Watanabe 2003): 16 To judge from Aikhenvald's (2006) glosses for (13)a-b below, it also appears to be realized (at least for some combinations of Mood, Tense and Aspect) in Tariana (North Arawak):

American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures, 1999

The theoretical aim of this book, indicated by its subtitle, is to elucidate the interface between semantic interpretation and morphosyntactic structure. Its empirical domain, indicated by the title, would appear to be ideally suited to this goal. Tense and aspect are well-studied semantic categories, but ones in which there are still plenty of puzzles. It is reasonable to think that an improved understanding may come about through detailed study of the