Languages & Linguistics
Grammatical Mood
Grammatical mood refers to the form of a verb that shows the speaker's attitude toward the action or state expressed. There are typically three moods: indicative (states a fact or asks a question), imperative (gives a command or request), and subjunctive (expresses a hypothetical or unreal situation). The mood of a verb can greatly impact the meaning and tone of a sentence.
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eBook - PDF- Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
As we will see below, much research on verbal mood has proceeded based on this kind of definition by example. We might also define verbal mood on the basis of semantic theory: Verbal mood is a distinction in form among clauses based on the presence, absence, or type of Paul Portner, Washington, DC, USA 370 Paul Portner modality in the grammatical context in which they occur. According to much semantic research on the indicative and subjunctive (and as we will see in detail below), these forms mark verbal mood in this sense. An advantage of this type of theoretical defi-nition is that it allows us to automatically relate our thinking about verbal mood to other theoretical issues. Obviously, it draws a link to the analysis of modality (article 14 [this volume] (Hacquard) Modality ), a well-developed and central part of semantic theory. But more importantly, it allows us to connect the study of verbal mood to a more general concept of mood, one which extends beyond verbal mood to encom-pass other phenomena which are sometimes described with the same label. Though it is the purpose of this article to describe the state of research on verbal mood, as defined above, it is obvious that the concept of mood has been used by linguists to talk about a much wider range of phenomena. It may be useful to describe the broader context briefly. A general definition of “mood”, under which verbal mood would fall as a subtype, might go as follows: Mood is a distinction (in form, meaning, or use) among clauses based on modal features of meaning in the context (either grammatical or conversational) in which they occur. Besides verbal mood, we can cite at least the following phenomena which seem to fall under the broad definition: 1. Notional mood Philosophers and linguists sometimes speak of categories of meaning which bear some intuitive connection to the meanings associated with verbal mood, for example propositions which are taken to be necessary, possible, desired, and so forth.
- Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In Latin and in many modern European languages, which have indicative, subjunctive, and imperative moods, this distinction could be handled in terms of “the formal features versus the typologically relevant semantic categories of which they are the exponents” (Palmer 1986: 21). In order to keep these concepts distinct, we use the term mood only to indicate the language-specific formal features of the verb. Roman grammarians adopted the term modus (‘manner’, ‘mode’), by which is usually meant the form that a verb assumes in order to reflect the manner in which the speaker presents the action or the state (Ernout & Thomas 1951: 183). 202 Elisabetta Magni Because there were grammatical markers for modality in their languages, the ancients assumed that there was a set of notional categories, the modes, marked by the moods. As to the nature of the modes, they developed two dif-ferent theories observing either how the moods reflect the “mental attitudes” of speakers, or the way they are used in different functions according to the various sentence types. Ever since, however, the search for a coherent set of semantic and/or functional categories characterizing the modes represented by the moods has been a difficult task, for multiple meanings and uses often characterize the moods in subordinate as well as independent clauses. Bearing this in mind, in the following discussion we try to make sense of polysemy and polyfunctionality, but we avoid the use of “mode” as a theoretical term. 3.3 The moods In Latin, the mood-forms have been reduced to three: the indicative, the sub-junctive, and the imperative. These are also called finite moods, for they allow personal endings on the verb (the imperative, however, marks distinctions of person and number to a limited extent) and may appear as the main verb of an independent clause.
eBook - PDF- Mark Jary, Mikhail Kissine(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
As Harnish (1994: 409) notes, the sentential notion of mood ‘treats mood basically as a cluster of phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of sentences’. A historically prior notion of mood, however, relates only to verbal inflection. Terms employed to distinguish moods in this sense include ‘indicative’, ‘subjunctive’, ‘infinitive’ and ‘impera- tive’. Because ‘imperative’ is used in both sentential and verbal charac- terisations of mood, there is again plenty of scope for confusion. 7 On the verbal understanding of ‘imperative’, a language has an imperative only if it morphologically distinguishes sentential mood through verbal inflection. On this understanding of mood, English does not have an imperative, for there is no inflection that specifies a verb for use in a clause uttered to issue a directive. To put it more simply, there is no verb that has a distinctively imperative form. Instead, English employs the bare stem, which makes it phonologically indistinguishable from the first-person singular and second-person indicative present tense, and from the infinitive. (The verb be is an exception in that its ‘imperative’ form corresponds to the infinitive, which is, of course, different from the 7 Likewise, ‘indicative’ and ‘declarative’ are sometimes used interchangeably to refer to a type of sentential mood. We will use ‘indicative’ to refer to the verbal mood, and ‘declarative’ for the sentential mood. 22 the data present indicative are or is forms.) This is in contrast to languages such as, for instance, Bulgarian and Irish. As you can see from (41), the imperative form in Bulgarian is morphologically marked by a distinct suffix (Tosheva 2006; Lindstedt 2010). 8 (41) In Irish too the sentential imperative mood is indicated by the presence of a specific verbal form that is not used in any other context (Ó Baoill 2010).
eBook - PDFThe Subjunctive in the Age of Prescriptivism
English and German Developments During the Eighteenth Century
- A. Auer, Kenneth A. Loparo, Charles Jones, Charles Jones(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
He explains this as follows: As Cases are the different Endings of the Noun, which are used to denote the Respect or Reference that Things have to one another; so Moods are the different Endings of the Verb, that are made use of to express the Man- ners or Forms of its signifying the Being, Doing or Suffering of a Thing. Grammarians do not agree about the Number of these Moods, not only by Reason of the Difference there is in Languages, some being capable of receiving more or fewer Inflexions or Endings than others, but also because of the different Manners of signifying, which may be very much multiply’d: For the Being, Doing or Suffering of a Thing, may be con- sidered not only simply by itself but also as to the Possibility of a Thing, that is, whether it can be done or not; as to the Liberty of the Speaker, that is, whether there be no Hindrance to prevent his doing of a Thing; as to the Inclination of the Will, that is, whether the Speaker has any Mind or Intention to the Doing of it; or to the Necessity of the Action to be done, that is, whether there be any Obligation of any Kind upon a Person to do Thing. (Greenwood, 1711, pp. 118–119) Here Greenwood states that moods are characterised by both the seman- tic aspect and the ‘different endings of the verb’. He appears to regard the latter as the criterial property, and it is because there is little choice of inflectional endings in English that he dismisses the existence of mood in the language. However, he dedicates almost half a page to defining Latin moods and in the process illuminates his conception of the form and meaning of the English subjunctive too. For example, he provides some incidental information on its morphological characteristics when he defines the Latin subjunctive mood as depending ‘upon some other Verb in the same Sentence, with some Conjunction between; as, he is mad, if he love’ (ibid., p. 119), and also when he discusses ‘the second and third persons of verbs’.
eBook - PDFGrounding
The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference
- Frank Brisard(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The meaning and distribution of French mood inflections Michel Achard 1. Introduction In Cognitive Grammar (CG), grounding predications specify the rela-tion that exists between a conceptualized entity and the speech situa-tion or ground, namely the speech act participants (speaker and hearer), and the immediate circumstances of the utterance. In the case of a clause, these predications evaluate the epistemic status of the event the clause designates. In French, the grammatical tools that allow conceptualizes to ad-dress the epistemic status of events include markers of person, tense, and mood, often grouped together into a single verbal ending. The goal of this paper is to investigate the meaning and distribution of the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional inflections. 1 Mood selection is determined by the evaluation of the status of the conceptualized event with respect to reality. The presence of the indicative inflection indicates that the event is reported as a proposition, that is to say that it includes a putative address in reality. The conditional inflection indicates that the event is construed as an alternative to reality. Fi-nally, the subjunctive inflection indicates that the conceptualized event is not considered with respect to reality, but to a specific, more local mental space. The paper is organized in the following fashion. Section two in-troduces the basic notions about grounding that will be required throughout the analysis. Section three describes the French mood sys-tem. Section four presents the semantic import of the indicative, con-ditional, and subjunctive inflections. Section five examines the distri-bution of these inflections in the context of the negative propositional 198 Michel Achard attitude verb penser 'think'. Section six summarizes the results and concludes the paper.
eBook - PDFAcquisition of Romance Languages
Old Acquisition Challenges and New Explanations from a Generative Perspective
- Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Maria Juan-Garau, Pilar Larrañaga, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Maria Juan-Garau, Pilar Larrañaga(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2.2 The pragmatics of mood interpretation Given the apparently diverse nature of semantic and syntactic properties that are involved in mood selection and in mood alternation in Spanish, it has often been concluded that the subjunctive must be understood as a grammatical element that is not amenable to any unitary semantic or syntactic account (Fábregas 2014). However, it has also been proposed that by adopting a pragmatic perspective which provides a systematic model of the integration of contextual assumptions, from both discourse and extralinguistic information, it is possible to develop an analysis of the semantics of the subjunctive that is valid for its diverse range of uses (Quer 2001; Ahern 2004, 2006). This is the perspective that will be taken here. We will consider the semantics of the subjunctive from the point of view of Sperber and Wilson ’ s (1986/1995) Relevance Theory (RT). In the model of ostensive-inferential verbal communication sustained in RT, inferential processes, triggered by the identi fi cation of the speaker ’ s communicative intention, determine to a great degree not only the implicit but also the explicit content conveyed in any given utterance. This perspective has led to the development of a distinction between two types of linguistic encoding: conceptual and procedural (Blakemore 1986; Wilson and Sperber 1993; Escandell, Leonetti and Ahern 2011). As opposed to expressions which refer to concepts, procedural expressions encode instructions that guide the inferential processes of utterance interpretation, constraining the identi fi cation of meaning either at the explicit level, as is the case for con-nectives such as so (Blakemore 1986; Escandell and Leonetti 2011), or in the Mood interpretation in Spanish 145 identi fi cation of what is being implicitly communicated.
eBook - PDF- Aynur Abish(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Harrassowitz Verlag(Publisher)
Moods Moods are synthetic devices consisting of bound inflectional suffixes and expres-sing different basic modal notions. As it is stated above, most markers used in mo-dern Turkic languages have undergone the process of grammaticalization, 11 and can express modal notions in different ways. For instance, necessitative mood can be expressed by grammaticalized mood markers in some of them. Thus, the Turkish necessitative mood is expressed by {-mA 2 lI 2 }, e.g. Gel-meli(dir) ‘X must/ought to come’. It may also be used in an epistemic sense, expressing pre-sumption, e.g. Zengin ol-mal ı 〈 rich be-NESS .3 SG 〉 ‘X must be rich’. In Kazakh, however, necessity is expressed in an analytic way, i.e. by lexical items (see Lexical expressions ). Turkic languages possess different moods to express volition, primarily the im-perative, voluntative, optative and hypothetical moods. The moods can be com-bined with other elements such as particles and lexical items to express different types of volition. The most important of these combinations will be presented in what follows. We will also include the non-productive imprecative forms and some modal usages of the aorist. Not all mood categories have complete paradigms for all persons. In the last part of the presentation of volitional expressions, some periphra-stic constructions will be described. “Volition is expressed by voluntative, optative and hypothetical markers, meaning ‘it is desirable that’, etc., suggesting that the action in question be carried out” (Johanson 2009: 489). “The devices used are not imperatives in the sense of direct commands to second persons. They do not define relations between participants and the realization of the action. They are thus not agent-oriented, i.e. objective moods that denote the will of the subject referent, but rather subjective moods. This does not, however, mean that they are necessarily speaker-oriented in the sense of expressing the speaker’s own will.
eBook - PDFThe Second Glot International State-of-the-Article Book
The Latest in Linguistics
- Lisa Cheng, Rint Sybesma(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Journal of Philosophy 78, 369-397. Beghelli, Filippo (1997). Mood and the interpretation of indefinites. Manuscript, University of Pennsylvania. Bell, A. (1980). Mood in Spanish: A discussion of some recent proposals. Hispania 63, 377-390. Bolinger, Dwight (1968). Postposed Main Phrases: An English rule for the Romance subimctive. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 10, 125-197. Bolinger, Dwight (1974). One Subjunctive or Two. Hispania 61, 218-234. Brée, David (1982). Counterfactuals and causality. Journal of Seman-tics 1. Bresnan, Joan (1972). Theory of Complementation in English Syntax. PhD thesis, MIT. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson (1987). Politeness: Some Univers-als in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chisholm, Roderick M. (1949). The contrary-to-fact conditional. In Her-vert Feigl and Wilfiid Sellars (Eds.), Readings in Philosophical Analy-sis, 482-497. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Chung, Sandra and Alan Timberlake (1985). Tense, aspect, and mood. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 202-258. Cambridge: Címibridge University Press. Cole, Peter and Jerry Morgan (1975). Syntax and Semantics vol. 3, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. Del Verourdi, Rhea, Irene Tsamadou, and Sophia Vassilaki (1994). Mood and Modality in Modem Greek: The particle NA. In Irene Philippaki Warburton, Catenna Nicolaidi, and Maria Sifianou (Eds.), Themes in Greek Linguistics: Papers from the first international conference on Greek linguistics, 185-192. Amsterdam and Philadephia: Benjamins. Dowty, David (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. Farkas, Donka (1985). Intensional Descriptions and the Romance Sub-junctive Mood. New York: Garland. Farkas, Donka (1992). On the semantics of subjunctive complements. In P. Hirschbueler and K. Koemer (Eds.), Romance Languages and Mod-ern Linguistic Theory, 69-104. Amsterdam and Philadephia: Benja-mins. von Fintel, Kai (1998).
- Horst Lohnstein, Susanne Trissler, Horst Lohnstein, Susanne Trissler(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
7. Verbal mood as a functional category As has become clear from the foregoing sections, verbal mood influences sentence mood in crucial respects and interacts in systematic ways with principles of sentence formation. In particular, verbal mood allows for or prohibits the formation of questions, declaratives, imperatives. Therefore, what is needed is a theory which brings together the various subcompo-nents necessary for the constitution of sentence mood in a uniform way and which derives the semantic effects in a compositional fashion. Let us start with some considerations about functional categories. Since the very beginning of theorizing about functional categories, use has been made of the inflectional elements and their content in order to motivate their existence. With minor exceptions, 12 little attention has been devoted to verbal mood with respect to its sentential relevance. Instead, since Chom-sky (1986), a CP-structure was assumed to account for the properties of the left periphery of clauses in the world's languages. Especially in the case of the Germanic V2-languages, the positions provided by a projection of the functional category C were useful and necessary in explaining movement processes, providing as they did the landing sites for the finite verb and ±wh moved constituents. The two positions are established by the head and Inflectional morphology and sentence mood in German 249 the specifier position of CP. But despite the feature [±wh], necessary to discriminate declaratives from questions, no further content was ascribed to the C° head position. On the basis of the [±wh]-feature, only two sentence types were distinguishable, but the others, like imperatives, exclamatives, or optatives, need different feature specifications. The assumption of a CP as the highest projection of the main clause is therefore mainly based on two factors: (11) a. the availability of two different landing sites for head-movement and Α-bar- movement b.
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
MOODS.
Moods [229] are different forms of the verb, each of which expresses the being, action, or passion, in some particular manner.There are five moods; the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Potential, the Subjunctive, and the Imperative.The Infinitive mood is that form of the verb, which expresses the being, action, or passion, in an unlimited manner, and without person or number: as, "To die,—to sleep;—To sleep!—perchance, to dream!"The Indicative mood is that form of the verb, which simply indicates or declares a thing: as, I write; you know: or asks a question; as, "Do you know?"—"Know ye not?"The Potential mood is that form of the verb which expresses the power, liberty, possibility, or necessity, of the being, action, or passion: as, "I can walk; he may ride; we must go."The Subjunctive mood is that form of the verb, which represents the being, action, or passion, as conditional, doubtful, and contingent: as, "If thou go, see that thou offend not."—"See thou do it not."—Rev., xix, 10.The Imperative mood is that form of the verb which is used in commanding, exhorting, entreating, or permitting: as, "Depart thou."—"Be comforted."—"Forgive me."—"Go in peace."OBSERVATIONS.
OBS. 1.—The Infinitive mood is so called in opposition to the other moods, in which the verb is said to be finite. In all the other moods, the verb has a strict connexion, and necessary agreement in person and number, with some subject or nominative, expressed or understood; but the infinitive is the mere verb, without any such agreement, and has no power of completing sense with a noun. In the nature of things, however, all being, action, or passion, not contemplated abstractly as a thing, belongs to something that is, or acts, or is acted upon. Accordingly infinitives have, in most instances, a reference to some subject of this kind; though their grammatical dependence connects them more frequently with some other term. The infinitive mood, in English, is distinguished by the preposition to; which, with a few exceptions, immediately precedes it, and may be said to govern it. In dictionaries, and grammars, to is often used as a mere index, to distinguish verbs from the other parts of speech. But this little word has no more claim to be ranked as a part of the verb, than has the conjunction if, which is the sign of the subjunctive. It is the nature of a preposition, to show the relation of different things, thoughts, or words, to each other; and this "sign of the infinitive" may well be pursued separately as a preposition, since in most instances it manifestly shows the relation between the infinitive verb and some other term. Besides, by most of our grammarians, the present tense of the infinitive mood is declared to be the radical form
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