Indicative Mood

8 Key excerpts on "Indicative Mood"

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  eBook - ePub

  Intermediate Greek Grammar

  Syntax for Students of the New Testament

  • David L. Mathewson, Elodie Ballantine Emig(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  8

  MOOD

  8.1. The selection of a particular verbal mood indicates or grammaticalizes a speaker’s or writer’s decision regarding how to portray the relationship of a verbal idea to reality. As Porter (50) points out, “The choice of attitude [mood] is probably the second most important semantic choice by a language user in selection of a verbal element in Greek, second only to verbal aspect.” When a Greek language user wants to portray a verbal idea (e.g., action, state of being) as if it were a reality, the Indicative Mood is selected. At the same time, it should be remembered that “the indicative is the ‘unmarked’ mood form” (Porter 51); that is, the indicative is the default mood, the mood used when none of the other moods is called for. Whether the action or state grammaticalized by an indicative verb form indicates objective reality or not is a matter of context, history, and the like. One may lie, employ various figures of speech (e.g., metaphor and hyperbole, which do not use language “literally”), or merely err in the Indicative Mood. If the Indicative Mood indicates reality, it is subjective reality.1 The nonindicative, or oblique, moods are alike in that they make projections or directions rather than assertions about reality.

  Assertion	Projection	Projection and Contingency	Direction
  Indicative	Subjunctive	Optative	Imperative

  Indicative Mood

  8.2. The primary use of the Indicative Mood in NT Greek is to make assertions about reality from the perspective of the writer or speaker, irrespective of objective reality. Nevertheless, the Indicative Mood may also be employed when asking questions, issuing commands, making wishes, or framing certain types of conditions. The Indicative Mood occurs about 15,618 times in the NT. For the tense and aspect use in the Indicative Mood, see chapter 6, on the Greek verb system.

  Declarative 8.3.

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  Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought

  Mood, Modality, and Propositional Attitudes

  • Anastasia Giannakidou, Alda Mari, Alda Mari, Ph.D.(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Since analytical contemplation is mediated by language, an additional layer of issues arises about language, specifically about whether and how language mediates to express thinking about the world. Natural languages vary in the vocabulary, form, and grammatical categories they realize; yet in addressing the question of language and thought, most Continental philosophy overlooks this striking variation and almost exclusively focuses on English. This focus affects negatively the set of data deemed relevant for analysis, and in effect diminishes, not to say dismisses, the role of linguistic diversity in revealing aspects of the logic needed in order to handle accurately and successfully the central questions of truth and knowledge.

  In this book, we will explore the interaction between truth, knowledge, and veridicality as they interact in the grammatical phenomenon of mood choice (subjunctive, indicative) in European languages. Our main illustrators will be Standard Modern Greek and the Romance language family, with specific emphasis on Italian and French. Mood choice is a multidimensional phenomenon, as we shall see, involving interactions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; and raises a number of issues that are literally invisible if we pay attention only to English simply because Modern English lacks the morphological category of mood in embedded clauses. Despite this absence, terms such as “subjunctive” and “indicative” continue to be routinely used by philosophers, e.g., in the discussion of English conditionals, often misleading us to think that we are dealing with a mood phenomenon. (We are not. Indicative and subjunctive conditionals are really about tense.)

  On the other hand, mood has been studied by traditional grammarians as a mainly morphosyntactic phenomenon, and in this tradition very little attention is paid to the semantics of propositional attitude verbs which are responsible for regulating mood choice. Traditional analyses are mostly interested in taxonomies and labeling of the verbal classes, with reference to realis and irrealis to cover the semantics of modal verbs (must, may, can etc.) and propositional attitude verbs (such as know, believe, remember, want, persuade and the like). The intuition is that somehow the indicative signals that the sentence is true (realis) , whereas the subjunctive signals that the sentence is untrue (irrealis) , thus implying that language directly accesses reality. This, however, as we will show, is an unwarranted assumption. Language, it will turn out, mostly encodes subjective representations of truth and reality construed by linguistic agents, i.e., the speaker or the subject of the attitude verb. In forming these representations, linguistic agents build veridicality stances

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  Imperatives

  • 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).

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  Semantics - Noun Phrases and Verb Phrases

  • Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  As mentioned, this article will focus on the narrower domain of verbal mood. Given the perspective that verbal mood reflects some modal feature of meaning in the context, it is inevitable that the study of mood would be intertwined with that of the relevant contexts. And indeed, that is what we find. The analysis of mood has proceeded hand in hand with the analysis of grammatical and pragmatic contexts which cause a particular form, like the indicative or subjunctive, to be selected. In the case of verbal mood, most of the detailed, theoretically precise research has focused on complement clauses, presumably because we have good (which is not to say perfect) theories of the semantics of many of the types of predicates which select indicative or subjunctive clauses. For example, Hintikka (1961) developed the possible worlds analysis of the semantics of belief statements which is now stand-ard in formal semantics, namely the idea that x believes p is true in a world w iff p is true in all of x ’s belief worlds in w . (See Section 2 for further discussion; x ’s belief worlds in w are the ones in which all of x ’s beliefs in w are true.) Theories of verb mood have tried to explain, in terms of this analysis, the mood selection of the verb which expresses belief in a particular language, for example why the complement of believe is subjunctive in Italian, (1), or why it is indicative in Spanish, (2). (1) Gianni crede che Maria sia partita. Gianni believe.indic that Maria be.subj left ‘Gianni believes that Maria left.’ (2) Juan cree que María se fue. Juan believe.indic that María cl go.indic ‘Juan believes that María left.’ (Note that I will generally only gloss the root and mood of verb forms, since mood is what we’re focusing on.) In this paper, we will focus mainly on theories of verbal mood in complement clauses, since this is where the relevant empirical and theoretical issues have been articulated most clearly (Section 2).

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  A Complete Guide to the Spanish Subjunctive

  • Hans-Jorg Busch, Hans-Jörg Busch(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The function or systematic grammatical meaning of the indicative, subjunctive, and imperative moods in Spanish

  By defining moods as the formal and systematic manifestations of modality, they are characterized as grammatical structures with a general modal meaning. This meaning cannot be explained in philosophical, semantic or pragmatic terms, but as a notion that corresponds to all the specific systematic manifestation in the language. Neither can it be defined as triggered by the meaning of other elements or just as the product of distribution rules.

  7.1 The formal distinction between indicative and subjunctive in Spanish

  The basic mood in Spanish is the indicative. Its verb endings and uses distinguish it from the subjunctive and the imperative.

  The formal distinction between the present indicative and subjunctive is minimal. It is just based on the distinction between the phonemes versus allophones /a/, /e/ and /i/. The same goes for the difference between the imperfect and the imperfect subjunctive (past subjunctive) of regular -ar verbs that are only distinguished by the phonemes [b] and [r]. This is similar to how we use phonemes to distinguish words with different meaning, such as fAn and fUn, bOOt and bOAt, haPPy and HaRRy , etc.

  Therefore, it is important for teachers to train their students to hear the phonetic difference between [a] and [e] and to point out the importance of this phonological distinction in the Spanish language.

  The subjunctive paradigm is in many ways more limited and restricted when compared to the indicative:

  1. There are only two simple subjunctive conjugations – if we ignore the differences between the two imperfect subjunctive forms hablara/hablase :1 the present and past subjunctive. However, there are five simple indicative conjugations: the present, preterit, imperfect, future, conditional indicative.2 (We can neglect the analytic forms consisting of haber

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  A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap

  The Life and Death of a Papuan Language

  • Don Kulick, Angela Terrill(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501512209-007 7 Mood Mood is the name given to the ways a language grammatically encodes a speaker’s attitude toward an utterance. How does a speaker issue a command or express a wish? Voice a doubt or assert a fact? English accomplishes many of these kinds of speech acts with modal verbs like ‘can’, ‘will’ and ‘must’. Tayap expresses them with particular kinds of verbal morphology. The declarative or Indicative Mood (i.e. making a statement) has been presented this grammar. It is not morphologi-cally marked in Tayap. The interrogative mood is expressed with the interrogative clitic =ke , discussed in Section 3.9. Other moods that are indicated through particular morphology on a verb are as follows: – Subjunctive (including imperative, jussive, indirect commands and wishes) (Section 7.1) – Prohibitive (Section 7.2) – Admonitive (Section 7.3) – Intentional (Section 7.4) – Benefactive (Section 7.5) Other free-form mood particles are also discussed (Section 7.6). Note that the realis/irrealis distinction which is fundamental to so much of Tayap’s verbal morphology is considered in this work to be a status distinction rather than a mood distinction, and as such is discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 rather than here. Note also that the realis/irrealis distinction is not available to non-Indicative Moods apart from the benefactive. 7.1 Subjunctive (sbj) Tayap has a distinct set of verb forms that encode a speaker’s desire that another person do something. The underlying syntactic structure in which a subjunctive appears is a subordinate clause (i.e. ‘I want that X do Y’), but a separate set of subjunctive forms can also occur in a main clause. Since those forms only occur in indirect commands, they are discussed below in Section 7.1.5. The inflectional pattern for intransitive and transitive verbs in the subjunc-tive mood is as follows:

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  The Development of Grammar in Spanish and The Romance Languages

  • Eduardo D. Faingold(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  6 The Mental Representation of Linguistic Markedness: Cognitive Aspects of the Spanish Subjunctive 6.1 Introduction This chapter studies cognitive aspects of the Spanish subjunctive. Rather than the loosely connected list of structures usually found in Spanish grammars (e.g. Alarcos Llorach 1994; Butt & Benjamin 1996), the uses of the present and past subjunctives in Spanish can be derived from a formula that captures the mental representation of these tenses. Also, in this chapter, I develop a cognitive rule explain- ing the retention of frequently used irregular future subjunctives in Spanish legalese. Apparently, diverse patterns in the uses of the Spanish subjunctive can be handled by such cognitive formula and functional mechanisms of language use, in interaction with marked- ness principles, whereby systematic developments occur in marked and unmarked categories and environments. The Indicative Mood is used to express those statements that are not irrealis; these are statements that are either neutral (i.e. make no assumptions) or that one assumes to be facts. In contrast, the sub- junctive is used in irrealis constructions; these are statements denot- ing an attitude toward an act or a state understood not as neutral or factual but as reflecting will, desire, doubt, non-expectativity, denial, counterfactuality, possibility, attitude, or emotion (Bailey 1996). In Chapter 5, I study the development of mood in Spanish in first language acquisition, second language learning, language change in 91 progress, and language history. As Chapter 5 discusses, indicatives are independently characterized as unmarked, and subjunctives as marked, because indicatives are acquired before subjunctives by children and second language learners alike; and because indicatives tend to be the basis of neutralization and analogical change in language change in progress and history.

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  Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited

  New Answers to Old Questions

  • Joanna Blaszczak, Anastasia Giannakidou, Dorota Klimek-Jankowska, Krzysztof Migdalski, Joanna Blaszczak, Anastasia Giannakidou, Dorota Klimek-Jankowska, Krzysztof Migdalski(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  PART II

  Irrealis Moods

  Subjunctive and Imperative

  This section of the volume deals with two irrealis modal categories, the subjunctive and the imperative. The principal research questions addressed are the following. What is the proper way of capturing the contrast between subjunctive and indicative in the grammar? What is the semantic contribution of the subjunctive? Are the subjunctive and the imperative discrete moods—that is, separate notional and grammatical categories? Is there a common core, a unique semantics that all non-Indicative Moods share? The chapters address these questions from somewhat different perspectives (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) and offer answers that differ but also converge in interesting ways.

  The study of grammatical mood has a long tradition in philology and linguistics. Typologically, we find morphological distinctions such as indicative, subjunctive , optative , and imperative . The subjunctive is typically thought of as a ‘dependent’ mood, but it can also be found in matrix clauses (Giannakidou 2009; and this volume). In selection patterns, the subjunctive follows a class of verbs that do not entail the truth of their complement (nonveridicality), and the indicative appears to be associated with full speaker commitment. The semantic dependency of the subjunctive seems to be correlated with tense dependency; that is, the temporal interpretation of the subjunctive clause depends on the predicate in the higher clause. This property has in turn certain repercussions for assumptions about the syntactic structure of embedded clauses—as it means, for example, that the CP or TP hosting the subjunctive verb does not create an opaque domain, a topic further discussed in Chapter 4

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