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.
7 Key excerpts on "Grammatical Mood"
eBook - ePubTruth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought
Mood, Modality, and Propositional Attitudes
- Anastasia Giannakidou, Alda Mari(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...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...
eBook - ePub- William Frawley(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But whereas there may be close connections between grammatical forms and semantic content in this regard, mood is a structural property of verbs in certain kinds of clauses. Some languages have many moods, sets of inflections for verbs to mark the dependency relations between clauses. Bybee (1985: 187) notes that Yupik has moods for consequence, ‘when,’ condition, ‘if,’ concession, ‘although,’ and precession, ‘before.’ West Greenlandic Eskimo has an inflection, kuni, to signal the conditional dependency between two clauses (Fortescue 1984: 56): 2. apuuk- kuni niri-uma- ssa- aq. arrive Cond eat want Fut 3S/Indic When he arrives, he will want to eat. Insofar as mood is determined by the nature of the overt form, Eskimo has a conditional mood not because of the notions that the mood denotes, but because the conditional dependency between two clauses surfaces as an inflection on the verb. Mood is a morphosyntactic device that may overlap with or denote modality, but nonetheless is distinct from modality. 9.12. Realis/Irrealis: The Basic Parameters of Modality We have surveyed the range of notions that modality covers and examined the distinction between modality and mood. All the while we have been careful to maintain that modality has distinct semantic content. The basic denotation of modality is the opposition of actual and nonactual worlds, or more technically, realis/irrealis. The notions underlying deixis provide an explanatory framework for the realis/irrealis opposition. 9.121. Modality as Epistemic Deixis The assertability of a proposition requires a judgment of relative factuality by the speaker, and this in turn necessitates a reference point against which to make the judgment. Modality thus exhibits all the classic symptoms of deixis...
eBook - ePub- David J. Young(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Mood 5.1 The meaning of mood Mood is the name given to those grammatical systems that express the speaker’s relation to a proposition, but this kind of meaning does not concern only the speaker and the proposition. Speakers take up attitudes towards what they are saying for the sake of communicating with other people; addressees are necessarily involved, and the speaker may impute to the addressee some relationship to the proposition. Thus if a speaker asserts 1 he will ordinarily believe that the addressee needs telling: 1 This is Bill’s house 2 Is this Bill’s house? Similarly if he asks the question in 2 he is imputing to the addressee knowledge of whether or not this is Bill’s house; otherwise he would not have asked. The speaker, in fact assigns roles in the process of communication to himself and the addressee. There are, of course, many other meaningful choices than simply that between declarative and interrogative. In the course of the next few chapters we shall see what these are. For the present we will look at the ways in which the most basic moods are signalled. 5.2 Basic moods In section 2.7 there is a system network for the clause...
- Hans-Jorg Busch(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 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: 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...
eBook - ePub- José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke, José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...al. (1986), Bosque (1990), Porto Dapena (1991), and Ahern (2009), among others. Extensive chapters are devoted to the description of moods in recent grammars of Spanish. See Ridruejo (1999), Pérez Saldanya (1999) and RAE-ASALE (2009: ch. 25). General presentations of the subjunctive mood in current theoretical linguistics may be found in Portner (1999), Quer (2005), and Laca (2010). Studies on Spanish moods from pragmatic, functional, or discourse-oriented perspectives include Lunn (1989, 1995), Mejías-Bikandi (1994), Maldonado (1995), Gregory (2001), Haverkate (2002), and Travis (2003). Since I will not be able to address all the questions raised in these works, I will point out the main issues that I consider to be central, and also the controversial questions that I think are alive nowadays, focusing on those which seem to be particularly relevant for present-day theoretical concerns. Both presentation and discussion of these matters will have to be necessarily schematic. Some relevant, grammatical issues, such as the relationship between mood and tense, will not be addressed here for reasons of space (see Chapter 18, above). There is an almost universal agreement on the fact that Spanish has three moods: indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. With many verbs, imperative forms are pre-empted by others, either from the indicative (Por favor, canta ‘Please, sing’), or the subjunctive paradigm (Por favor, canten ‘Please, sing’), acquiring illocutionary force in both cases. The indicative is the verbal mood chosen “by default”, in the sense that it may appear without a trigger in main or subordinate clauses. The imperative mood is restricted to matrix clauses, as in Ven aquí ‘Come here.’ It is incompatible with negation and with the subordinate conjunction que in these clauses: (1) a. Quiero que {*ven/vengas}. ‘I want you to come-IMPER./come-SUBJ.’ b. No {*ven/vengas}. ‘Do not come-IMPER./come-SUBJ.’ c...
eBook - ePubTemporality
Universals and Variation
- Maria Bittner(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Chapter 6 Mood as Illocutionary Centering I have argued that top-level discourse reference is a unifying generalization for obligatory argument-filling categories – including English and Polish tenses, and Polish and Mandarin aspect features. Temporal reference in these languages is based on one or both of these categories. The question arises how this approach might extend to a language like Kalaallisut, which has neither category, but only obligatory argument-filling person (2) and mood. Most theories of mood and modal reference abstract away from temporal reference (see e.g. Hamblin 1973; Stalnaker 1975; Karttunen 1977; Kratzer 1981; Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982; Roberts 1989; Portner 1997, 2004; Murray 2010; Starr 2010). Alternatively, modal and temporal reference are analyzed as parallel and independent phenomena, up to “branching futures” (e.g. Thomason 1984; Muskens 1995; Stone 1997; Mastop 2005). Either way, the resulting theory cannot explain how a tenseless mood-based language can express temporal reference as precisely as tense-based English (see e.g. Bittner 2005, 2007, 2011). More promising is the performative approach, which relates modal reference to temporal reference in a principled way that can shed light on this puzzle. Specifically, Lewis (1972) proposes “to analyze all sentences, declarative and non-declarative, into two components: a sentence radical that specifies a state of affairs, and a mood that determines whether the speaker is declaring that the state of affairs holds, commanding that it hold, asking whether it holds, or what.” Lewis's (1972) implementation assigns truth values to all sentences and thus fails to capture the intuition that non-declaratives have no truth values. It also fails to extend to embedded sentences. In Kalaallisut, the latter “failure” is, in fact, a plus, because illocutionary mood is restricted to matrix sentences. Moreover, recent theories of (not-)at-issue content (e.g...
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...
