Tense, Aspect, Mood and Modality

Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. , 2006

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."

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010

… Syntax: Adverbial Phrases, Adverbs, Mood, Tense, 2010

Language Sciences, 2005

Perhaps no other grammatical category in linguistics has been defined and interpreted as divergently as modality. Sometimes vastly different formal categories are subsumed under this label. This paper focusses on the analysis of what are arguably the two major approaches to the definition of modality in present-day linguistics, namely, the one that is based on ÔspeakersÕ attitudes and opinionsÕ and the one that is based on a concept of realis/irrealis or factuality. It is argued that the former is fundamentally flawed, as the definition fails to distinguish the formal classes to which it does apply from those to which it do not. In contrast, modality can be neatly and coherently defined in terms of Ôfactuality.Õ Speakers draw on the formal expressions of this category as one among many categories as their resources to express their attitudes and opinions.

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).

Proceedings of the 45th Northeast Linguistics Society, 2016

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.