Cross-linguistic variation in modality systems: The role of mood  

Oleh:

Matthewson, Lisa

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Semantics & Pragmatics (Fulltext) vol. 3 (2010), page 1–74.
Topik: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS; Subjunctive; mood; irrealis; modals; imperatives; evidentials; questions; free relatives; attitude verbs; Salish
Fulltext: 114-1647-1-PB.pdf (620.38KB)

Isi artikel

The St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish) subjunctive mood appears in nine distinct environments, with a range of semantic effects, including weakening an imperative to a polite request, turning a question into an uncertainty statement, and creating an ignorance free relative. The St’át’imcets subjunctive also differs from Indo-European subjunctives in that it is not selected by attitude verbs. In this paper I account for the St’át’imcets subjunctive using Portner’s (1997) proposal that moods restrict the conversational background of a governing modal. I argue that the St’át’imcets subjunctive restricts the conversational background of a governing modal, but in a way which obligatorily weakens the modal’s force. This obligatory modal weakening—not found with Indo-European non-indicative moods—correlates with the fact that St’át’imcets modals differ from Indo-European modals along the same dimension. While Indo-European modals typically lexically encode quantifi- cational force, but leave conversational background to context, St’át’imcets modals encode conversational background, but leave quantificational force to context

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