Languages & Linguistics
Interrogative Mood
The interrogative mood is a grammatical mood used to form questions. It is characterized by the use of an auxiliary verb before the subject of the sentence. In English, the auxiliary verb "do" is often used to form questions in the interrogative mood.
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eBook - ePubA Grammar of Paluai
The Language of Baluan Island, Papua New Guinea
- Dineke Schokkin(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
10 Speech act distinctions and polarityThe two categories discussed in this chapter, mood and polarity, relate at the same time to the VC and to a higher level of organisation such as the clause or the sentence. Mood is defined as the grammatical expression of illocutionary force; polarity refers to the positive or negative value of a proposition.10.1 Mood
Three moods can be distinguished: declarative, imperative and interrogative. Each type of mood is most prototypically connected to one type of speech act or illocutionary function: declarative mood is normally used for statements, imperative mood for commands, and Interrogative Mood for questions. Paluai does not have morphological marking for any of these, nor is mood distinguished by grammatical means such as constituent order. Mood is mainly indicated by means of prosody, with different intonation patterns for a question or a statement (see Section 2.3.2.1). In addition, grammatical criteria for declarative and imperative clauses are slightly different, and content questions can be recognised by the presence of a question word. In what follows, features of declarative, interrogative and imperative sentences will be discussed, with special attention to the use of the interrogative and the imperative moods. Differences between the latter two and the declarative mood, which can be considered the unmarked or default option, will be highlighted.10.1.1 Interrogative Mood
Interrogative Mood applies to the speech act “question”, which is most typically an information-seeking speech act. Three types of questions can be distinguished: content questions, polar questions and tag questions. These will be discussed in turn.10.1.1.1 Content questions
Content questions contain an interrogative word and make inquiries about a particular object or proposition (see Section 4.7 for an overview of interrogative words and what type of element they query). The interrogative word remains in situ: its syntactic slot is exactly that of the queried constituent in the question’s declarative counterpart. Content questions are thus recognisable by the presence of an interrogative word, and also by a specific intonation contour that differs from the one associated with declarative statements. The focused element of a question receives phrasal stress. The question ‘What are you doing?’ can be realised in two ways (with the stressed element printed in bold):
eBook - PDFModality and Mood in Romance
Modal interpretation, mood selection, and mood alternation
- Martin G. Becker, Eva-Maria Remberger, Martin G. Becker, Eva-Maria Remberger(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
In fact, Palmer (1986: 30 – 31, 78 – 81) does provide evidence of Interrogative Moods in some of the world’s languages but these were, at least then, 1 too sparse and * I am extremely grateful to Hardarik Blühdorn, Martin Becker and Eva-Maria Remberger for their valuable comments on previous drafts. 1 Due to more accurate typological descriptions (Dryer 2005), we are nowadays in a position to consider the distribution of interrogative verbal morphology in polar questions as less sparsely attested than in Palmer’s (1986) description. However, in comparing the WALS maps the distribution of morphological Imperatives and Interrogatives (van der Auwera & Lejeune 2005 and Dryer 2005) still seem to be skewed in favour of the former. The comparison may possibly be biased by the unclear boundary between question particles and proper interrogative affixes (Dryer 2005: 470), which might lead to the underestimation of the occurrence of inflectional affixes. 110 Mario Squartini controversial to be compared to the robust evidence supporting the Imperative. In Lyons’ and Palmer’s perspectives this is a very general problem crucially impinging on the controversial relationship between mood and modality. In a sense, the gap between the Imperative and the Interrogative constitutes a more radical imbalance between deontic and epistemic modality. Given that deontic modality has its own prototypical mood – the Imperative, defined by Palmer (1986: 108) as the “unmarked member of the deontic system” – the Interrogative might have been the prototypical representative of epistemic modality (if it had been more robustly documented). This would have confirmed the systematic relation between illocutionary acts (questions) and modal functions, which is what is required in Lyons’ general architecture, heavily dependent on Searle’s speech acts theory.
eBook - ePubFoundations of Speech Act Theory
Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives
- S.L. Tsohatzidis(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Two classes of sentences tend to stand apart from others by virtue of their modality. The first class comprises imperative sentences, which do not make statements at all, but express commands or instructions … Interrogative sentences also stand in contrast to declarative sentences … they may be characterized by additional modalities which indicate the expectations of the speaker. (ibid.: 303–4) However, in a more recent work (1977) he retracts his earlier usage, It [mood] cannot be identified with either modality or illocutionary force as such … In traditional usage, ‘mood’ is applied to such subsets of inflected forms of verbs as are distinguished one from another by means of the terms ‘indicative’, ‘imperative’, ‘subjunctive’, etc.; and we have chosen to respect this usage. (ibid.: 848) Lyons does not say what role the verbal notion of mood plays in the theory of language. 2 On the other hand, we will see exactly what role the sentential conception will play. We will follow the tradition of treating mood as a mixed concept by treating it as a form-with-a-function. There is also the compromise position; mood is a verbal inflection indicating the use of the sentence. For instance, Bybee (1985) writes, 3 mood is a marker on the verb that signals … what the speaker is doing with the proposition … the verb inflection signals a speech act type -something the speaker is doing with the whole proposition. (ibid.: 105–6) More recently, in the Jespersen tradition, Sadock and Zwicky (1985) characterize a mood (they call it a ‘sentence type’) in two ways: 1 Within a language: a mood is ‘a coincidence of grammatical structure and conventional (conventionally indicated) conversational use’ (Sadock and Zwicky 1985: 155). A ‘regular association of form and speaker’s use of sentences’ (ibid.: 156)
eBook - ePubEnglish and Korean in Contrast
A Linguistic Introduction
- Jong-Bok Kim(Author)
- 2024(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
9 Interrogative Constructions: Asking a Question9.1 Clausal Types and Interrogatives
As noted in Chapter 6 , languages have a set of clause types characteristically used to indicate different speech acts or moods. Consider the following examples in English:- (1)
- Declarative: John is clever.
- Interrogative: Is John clever? Who is clever?
- Exclamative: How clever you are!
- Imperative: Be very clever.
Each sentence form here has its own typical function to represent a speech act. For example, the declarative makes a statement, the interrogative asks a question, the exclamative represents an exclamatory statement, and the imperative issues a directive. However, these correspondences are not always one‐to‐one. For example, the declarative in (2a) represents not a statement but a question, and the interrogative in (2b) indicates a directive:- (2)
- I ask you if this is what you want.
- Would you mind taking out the garbage?
- (3)
- Declarative
사과를 먹었다. sakwa‐lul mek‐ess‐ta apple‐ACC eat‐PST ‐DECL ‘(He) ate an apple.’ - Interrogative
사과를 먹었니? sakwa‐lul mek‐ees‐ni? apple‐ACC eat‐PST ‐QUE ‘Did you eat the apple?’ - Imperative
사과를 먹어라! sakwa‐lul mek‐ela! apple‐ACC eat‐IMP ‘Eat an apple!’ - Exclamative
사과를 맛있게 먹는구나! sakwa‐lul masisskey mek‐nun‐kwuna apple‐ACC deliciously eat‐PRES ‐EXCL ‘(lit.) How deliciously you are eating the apple!’
- Declarative
The declarative, interrogative, imperative, and suggestive here is marked by the final verbal suffix, and linked to a typical speech act. That is, (3a) makes a statement, (3b) asks a question, (3c) gives a command, and (3d) makes a suggestion. Similar to English, this general mapping relation can be overridden:
eBook - PDF- Osahito Miyaoka(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
1357 2.2. Nominal clauses ................................................................................ 1358 2.3. Word order ........................................................................................ 1359 3. Indirect (rhetorical) questions I wonder: | =ki | .............................. 1359 4. Exclamations by interrogative-mood verbs ...................................... 1360 There are a number of types of questions as stated (§ 5.3.1), in particular, con-tent or informational questions ( wh -) and binary questions ( yes -no ), both of which are typically characterized by a sentence-final (highest) tone rapidly fall-ing, displaying the same intonation as declarative sentences. While binary ques-tions are characterized by the rhetorical question | qaa | (is that right? sen-tence adverbial, § 53.2) and no interrogative-mood verb, content questions obligatorily contain an interrogative word (§ 15.2) and a verb that is generally in the Interrogative Mood (this chapter). Content questions are also possible with verbs in other moods than the interrogative the participial (§ 47), optative (§ 49), and appositional (§ 51). 1. Inflection The inflection for interrogative verbs consists of a mood marker followed by a subject person marker (intransitive), or a subject-object marker (transitive). As with the optative, the mood marker has different variants depending upon the subject person, i.e. |+ 1 ta -| (postconsonantal) ~ |+ a -| (postvocalic) for the third person and |+ 1 ci -| for the first and the second person, as indicated by the shaded portions in Table 47. The third person marker is illustrated, with an interrogative word implied (why, when, ): (1) 3sg. | niic [+ 1 ta +Ø| > niita he hears? (e.g. with ciin why) | n [+ a +Ø| > nera he eats? 3pl. | niic [+ 1 ta + t | > niitat they hear? | n [+ a + t | > nerat they eat?
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
Subjunctive Mood. But here again it is better to refer still to the Indicative or Potential mood whatsoever has any proper sign of such mood, even though it occur in a dependent clause.OBS. 3.—The Potential mood is so called because the leading idea expressed by it, is that of the power of performing some action. This mood is known by the signs may, can, must, might, could, would, and should. Some of these auxiliaries convey other ideas than that of power in the agent; but there is no occasion to explain them severally here. The potential mood, like the indicative, may be used in asking a question; as, "Must I budge? must I observe you? must I stand and crouch under your testy humour?"—Shakspeare. No question can be asked in any other mood than these two. By some grammarians, the potential mood has been included in the subjunctive, because its meaning is often expressed in Latin by what in that language is called the subjunctive. By others, it has been entirely rejected, because all its tenses are compound, and it has been thought the words could as well be parsed separately. Neither of these opinions is sufficiently prevalent, or sufficiently plausible, to deserve a laboured refutation. On the other hand, James White, in his Essay on the English Verb, (London, 1761,) divided this mood into the following five: "the Elective," denoted by may or might; "the Potential," by can or could; "the Determinative" by would; "the Obligative," by should; and "the Compulsive," by must. Such a distribution is needlessly minute. Most of these can as well be spared as those other "moods, Interrogative, Optative, Promissive, Hortative, Precative, &c.", which Murray mentions only to reject. See his Octavo Gram.
- Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Although the existence of interrogative constructions seems a universal property of natural languages, languages differ substan-tially in the strategies they employ for coding interrogatives. There are seven basic strate-gies of deriving interrogatives, some of them being restricted to particular types of inter-rogatives: (i) intonation, (ii) interrogative particles, (iii) interrogative tags, (iv) disjunc-tive constructions (v) the order of constitu-ents, (vi) verbal inflection and (vii) interroga-tive words. Some of these strategies can occur in combination, others may be mutually ex-clusive. Interrogative systems are related to many other subsystems of grammar (relative pro-nouns, indefinite pronouns, conditionals, etc.) and interrogative marking may be derived from or expand into these areas. 2. Clause types and associated speech acts There are three basic clause types to be found in the languages of the world and interroga-tives are one of them. Besides interrogative clauses, we find declarative and imperative clauses and with each of these clause types a prototypical speech act is associated. The speech act normally associated with declara-tives is that of making a statement, with in-terrogatives that of asking a question and with imperatives it is the issuing of a com-mand (directives), as the following English examples illustrate: (2) (a) She is a good student, (declarative, statement) (b) Is she a good student? (interrogative, question) (c) Be a good student! (imperative, direc-tive) As is well-known, this conventionalised rela-tionship between syntactic structure or clause type and conversational use is by no means isomorphic and in actual use declaratives and interrogatives (not so much imperatives, though) may be associated with various other speech acts (cf. Huddleston 1994 for a good summary).
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