Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[zompist]

Palmer explicitly notes the Romance languages as having both mood and auxiliaries.

Oh, I didn’t know that! Although I guess it isn’t too surprising that I missed this, given that I only read half of Palmer’s book. Do you have any idea whether there are any non-Romance (and preferably non-IE) languages which also do that?

I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for, but Hixkaryana has an irrealis mood, plus a bunch of modal particles which combine with it and alter its meaning.

Palmer surveys a number of subjunctive/irrealis systems; none of them seem to be used for interrogatives. However, evidential forms are often used for questions.

[Ares Land]

Re: German /e:/, thanks everyone!
(And clearly there's a dialectal component to it... I noticed it with Egon in Dark, so the name is pronounced by a variety of actors, and some do have [e:])

[But even if it was, why would a mood exclude modals? I'm pretty sure you can say in French e.g. J'aimerais que vous puissiez venir ("I'd like you to be able to come", where puissiez is both subjunctive and itself a modal).

Does French have modal verbs?

It does, but the distinction between modal and regular verbs isn't quite as clear as in English.

[Richard W]

It has auxiliary verbs that express modality at least, much like English... if that counts.

You mean like savoir? (That example is just to explore the bounds.) I'm not yet disputing the ability of French to express the concepts. I'm doubting that they need to be distinguished from ordinary verbs.

[Ares Land]

It has auxiliary verbs that express modality at least, much like English... if that counts.

You mean like savoir? (That example is just to explore the bounds.) I'm not yet disputing the ability of French to express the concepts. I'm doubting that they need to be distinguished from ordinary verbs.

There are some criteria that differentiate them from ordinary verbs. No passive for instance, and a restricted imperative but I'm not sure these criteria work 100%. How about penser? OK, maybe penser is a modal too, but how about estimer?

Your example is spot on btw: in Belgian French, savoir is a modal. Can you turn on the lights > B. Fr. Sais-tu allumer la lumière?

[Richard W]

So vouloir is not a modal, because of sentences like:

Dans le même temps, nous ne devons cependant pas lire davantage dans ce concept que ce qui était voulu en 2005.

(I hope that's not franglais - it's from a UN document.)

[Ares Land]

So vouloir is not a modal, because of sentences like:

Dans le même temps, nous ne devons cependant pas lire davantage dans ce concept que ce qui était voulu en 2005.

(I hope that's not franglais - it's from a UN document.)

The translation is too litteral, (the 'read into this' bit is a tell-tale), but the sentence is grammatical and understandable. There are other examples though, like c'est voulu ('that's intentional').

I grabbed a set of criteria from a wikipedia article, and at first they seemed reasonable, but I keep coming up with counterexamples, so let's just forget about it. In fact the one verbs which could be described as a modal in the Germanic sense is pouvoir.
Maybe a more robust criterion would be 'verbs that can be followed by an infinitive'. In which case, 'dire' and 'aimer' would count as modals (come to think of it, that's not unreasonable!)

[Richard W]

That agrees with my feeling that French doesn't really have a special category of modal verbs.

[Ryusenshi]

I tend to agree. Traditional French grammar distinguishes verbes auxiliaires (of which there are only two, avoir and être) which are usually followed by a participle; and verbes semi-auxiliaires (vouloir, savoir, pouvoir...) which are followed by the infinitive. These "semi-auxiliary verbs" aren't really a special class of verbs, and are pretty normal verbs otherwise. Well, most of them are irregular, but they're "normally irregular". Like, in English to drink is an irregular verb (drank, drunk) but is otherwise normal; while can is really weird (it has no infinitive, no participle, no "-s" for the 3rd person singular, the past doubles as conditional). French pouvoir and vouloir are closer to the former: they have an infinitive and a participle like any other verb.

As for the initial question: traditional French grammar says the moods are indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative, infinitive, and participle; interrogative isn't a "mood" in this classification. And none of those moods use "modal verbs" or "semi-auxiliary verbs".

[priscianic]

I think some of the discussion here re: mood and modality seems to be assuming that mood can be reduced to or is fundamentally the same thing as modality (or vice-versa). (I think some of the replies fight against this notion). Certainly Kat's original question presupposes that there's an inherent conflict between a sentence expressing both mood and modality. I think this kind of thinking is a mistake: mood and modality are not the same. Worse, mood is likely not even a coherent unified notion.

(I think a lot of the confusion arises because the typological literature often conflates all of these things, as in Palmer 1986/2001, in ways that are not helpful and go against our understanding of these phenomena in the semantic literature. See Matthewson 2013 and Davis, Gillon, and Matthewson 2014 for discussions about how the methods of formal semantics are vital for getting a proper understanding of variation and diversity in natural language semantics, and how "purely typological" approaches can lead to unsatisfactory results.)

Semanticists think about modality as a way to allow us to talk about different possibilities for the way the would could, should, or must necessarily be. Von Fintel and Heim, in their textbook on intensional semantics, introduce the idea by first starting with Hockett's design features of language—in particular, the property of displacement, the property that allows us to talk about times and situations and locations and possibilities that aren't right here, right now. Modality displaces us within the space of possibilities for what the world could look like.

While generally discussion about modality focuses on modal auxiliaries in English (which is quite a typical move, but an unfortunate one in my opinion), modality is just a term for a particular kind of meaning, and that kind of meaning is not limited to any single morphosyntactic category. Modality sinks its teeth into just about every part of human language. There are modal nouns (possibility, permission), modal adjectives (possible, likely, alleged), modal adverbs (possibly, apparently), modal verbs/auxiliaries (may, must, have (to)), and the list can go on. Somewhat more controversially, people have proposed that evidentiality is (always) modal (Matthewson 2011), progressives are modal (Portner 1998), habituals are modal (Boneh and Doron 2008), futures are modal (Klecha 2013), etc. (I've linked open access papers/drafts here; these proposals all have earlier precedents in the literature that I couldn't find open access versions of online.)

I don't know of a single language that has only one way to express modal meanings.

Mood, on the other hand, is less well formalized and studied compared to modality, at least within the semantics literature—a notable exception is Portner's (2018) book on mood. In it, he distinguishes between two notions of mood: sentence mood, which roughly corresponds to the notion of "sentential force", encompassing things like declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives, and verbal mood, which refers to things like indicative and subjunctive. At least on the surface, it's not at all clear that these should be unified under the same umbrella: sentence mood has to do with conventionalized ways utterances are used in discourse (to present information, to ask questions, to command), and verbal mood seems to be a kind of morphosyntactic-semantic category that is prototypically triggered/selected for by different kinds of predicates (i.e. some predicates select for indicative, some select for subjunctive). Portner eventually tries to unify these two notions, but acknowledges that doing so is novel and perhaps somewhat controversial.

In any event, there's no a priori reason to expect any inherent conflict between a language's expression(s) of modality, sentence mood, and verbal mood. Those are all separate (though related and interacting) notions with unfortunately similar names (seems to be a trend in linguistics—see perfect versus perfective, for instance...). And of course, the morphosyntactic expression of these categories is bound to vary between languages, and even within a single language (as in the case of modality).

[Ryusenshi]

I don't know much about linguistics beyond traditional grammar, but if I understand you well: it seems to me that, in French (or Romance in general), mood and modality are orthogonal. Mood (or at least verbal mood) is expressed through verb morphology (je sais / je saurais / que je sache / sache / sachant / savoir), while modality is expressed through semi-auxiliary verbs (je peux savoir / je dois savoir) or any other method (adverbs, adjectives etc).

In English, the distinction is more blurry because the so-called modal verbs are used for both (I would know / I can know / I must know).

[KathTheDragon]

That's actually really enlightening, Prisc, thanks for that monster post. I'm gonna have to chew on it for a bit, but I think I don't have to change that much about Naswiyan, which is what spurred my original question. At least, all that needs changing is a few restrictions being loosened a little.

[priscianic]

I don't know much about linguistics beyond traditional grammar, but if I understand you well: it seems to me that, in French (or Romance in general), mood and modality are orthogonal. Mood (or at least verbal mood) is expressed through verb morphology (je sais / je saurais / que je sache / sache / sachant / savoir), while modality is expressed through semi-auxiliary verbs (je peux savoir / je dois savoir) or any other method (adverbs, adjectives etc).

In English, the distinction is more blurry because the so-called modal verbs are used for both (I would know / I can know / I must know).

My point is not just that in Romance mood and modality are orthogonal, but that mood and modality are always orthogonal, by definition.

I think it's a mistake to say that English modal auxiliaries are "used for expressing (verbal) mood". English does have an expression of verbal mood—a disappearing and archaic subjunctive, as in my desire that he leave. But if English didn't have a subjunctive (and probably several people's Englishes do not), then English could reasonably be argued to lack an expression of verbal mood altogether (in a similar way to how Mandarin could very reasonably be argued to lack an expression of case, for instance).

I think it's also a mistake to say that modals are used for expressing sentential mood as well. It's certainly true that some modalized statements are used for speech acts that aren't typical assertions—e.g. you can order your kids to wash the dishes by saying you must wash the dishes. But I think it's crucial to distinguish between speech acts on the one hand, which are the ways utterances are actually used in context and the "effect on the world" that those utterances have, and sentence mood/sentential force on the other hand, which are more abstract, linguistic categories that might conventionally be linked to certain speech acts—declaratives with assertion, interrogatives with questioning, imperatives with orders—but aren't necessarily forced to convey those speech acts. Declaratives can be questions (I wonder if they've already washed the dishes), interrogatives can be orders (Do you want to wash the dishes?), imperatives can be (parts of) assertions (Wash the dishes, and you'll feel a great sense of satisfaction), etc.

That's actually really enlightening, Prisc, thanks for that monster post. I'm gonna have to chew on it for a bit, but I think I don't have to change that much about Naswiyan, which is what spurred my original question. At least, all that needs changing is a few restrictions being loosened a little.

No problem! Glad it was helpful.

[bradrn]

Would it be correct to say that all languages have some way of representing modality, but not all have a way to represent mood? And if a language has mood, then does it tend to not have a grammatical category of modals?

[priscianic]

Would it be correct to say that all languages have some way of representing modality, but not all have a way to represent mood? And if a language has mood, then does it tend to not have a grammatical category of modals?

I think that the answer to your first question is yes, and I have really no idea about the answer to your second question. To answer your second question, we would need a large-enough sample of crosslinguistic data that not only carefully distinguishes between mood and modality, but also carefully looks at the various modal expressions in the language and identifies whether there's a particular class of modal expressions that show morphosyntactically distinct behavior from other expressions in the language (like English modals, for instance). I'm not sure this kind of typological work has been done yet.

[zompist]

Mood, on the other hand, is less well formalized and studied compared to modality, at least within the semantics literature—a notable exception is Portner's (2018) book on mood. In it, he distinguishes between two notions of mood: sentence mood, which roughly corresponds to the notion of "sentential force", encompassing things like declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives, and verbal mood, which refers to things like indicative and subjunctive. At least on the surface, it's not at all clear that these should be unified under the same umbrella: sentence mood has to do with conventionalized ways utterances are used in discourse (to present information, to ask questions, to command), and verbal mood seems to be a kind of morphosyntactic-semantic category that is prototypically triggered/selected for by different kinds of predicates (i.e. some predicates select for indicative, some select for subjunctive). Portner eventually tries to unify these two notions, but acknowledges that doing so is novel and perhaps somewhat controversial.

This whole post is great stuff, and I look forward to reading some of the cites.

I like the sentence mood/verbal mood distinction. The definition of verbal mood seems rather vague, though. Now I am mostly relying on Palmer, but I think he makes a good case that irrealis and subjunctive are the same thing-- it's mostly historical accident that the terms are used for different regions, and attempts to separate them formally are not convincing. This gives us a larger database than just subjunctive.

And given his survey, I'm not sure I see why mood and verbal modality are distinct except morphologically. The prototypical meaning of the irrealis is that some event is, well, less real; but exactly what unrealities are covered is highly variable. The future may be realis or irrealis; imperatives can be either; likewise the habitual past. So far as I can see, these are all covered by the idea of displacement.

[priscianic]

Mood, on the other hand, is less well formalized and studied compared to modality, at least within the semantics literature—a notable exception is Portner's (2018) book on mood. In it, he distinguishes between two notions of mood: sentence mood, which roughly corresponds to the notion of "sentential force", encompassing things like declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives, and verbal mood, which refers to things like indicative and subjunctive. At least on the surface, it's not at all clear that these should be unified under the same umbrella: sentence mood has to do with conventionalized ways utterances are used in discourse (to present information, to ask questions, to command), and verbal mood seems to be a kind of morphosyntactic-semantic category that is prototypically triggered/selected for by different kinds of predicates (i.e. some predicates select for indicative, some select for subjunctive). Portner eventually tries to unify these two notions, but acknowledges that doing so is novel and perhaps somewhat controversial.

This whole post is great stuff, and I look forward to reading some of the cites.

I like the sentence mood/verbal mood distinction. The definition of verbal mood seems rather vague, though.

It is quite vague, I agree. Portner doesn't get much more specific about motivating the concept of verbal mood except by saying "verbal mood can be understood as the subcategory of mood with the primary function of indicating how the proposition is used in the computation of subsentential modal meaning" (Portner 2018:48). This is about as vague as you can get: verbal mood is somehow related to modality, but it isn't itself modal. Of course, once he gets into the nitty-gritty of comparing different people's formal analyses of verbal mood, it does get more specific (e.g. some people think subjunctive is triggered when there's some sort of comparison between different sets of possibilities, some people think that the indicative-subjunctive contrast has to do with qualitative differences between the kinds of worlds you're evaluating the proposition at, etc.)—but some of the specificity comes at the cost of failing to motivate a core intuition behind what verbal mood "really is".

Now I am mostly relying on Palmer, but I think he makes a good case that irrealis and subjunctive are the same thing-- it's mostly historical accident that the terms are used for different regions, and attempts to separate them formally are not convincing. This gives us a larger database than just subjunctive.

Subjunctives often show up in contexts where you wouldn't expect something irrealis to show up—for instance, a common pattern across Romance is for subjunctives to show up in the complements of emotive factive predicates ("factivity", in linguistic semantics, is a term for a truth presupposition: a factive predicate is a predicate that presupposes the truth of its complement). For example:

Code: Select all

1)  Me alegra         que  haya          llegado Juan.    (Spanish)
    me make.happy.3sg that have.SBJV.3sg arrived Juan
    ‘I'm glad that Juan arrived.’

You can't say this sentence if you don't believe that Juan arrived. You're not saying that you're glad (or would be glad) if Juan arrived in some hypothetical world—you're saying that you're glad that Juan arrived in this world. I'm not sure how much more real you can get—and yet you're required to use subjunctive here.

In a similar vein, you can get subjunctives in sentential subjects, even factive ones (if I'm not misremembering, you can get this in Spanish and French, and perhaps more broadly across Romance). For example:

Code: Select all

2)  [El  que  la  policía los  haya          interrogado ] tiene lógica.    (Spanish)
     the that the police  them have.SBJV.3sg interrogated  has   logic
     ‘(The fact that) the police interrogated them makes sense.

Again, you wouldn't say this sentence if you didn't take for granted that the police did in fact interrogate them, in this world. Hard to see how much more "realis" you can get.

It's hard to account for this kind of data if you think that (these) subjunctives are reducible to some kind of "irrealis" marker. You'd either have to do some fancy stuff to get something irrealis to appear in factive contexts, or you'd have to propose rampant accidental homophony between "subjunctive-as-irrealis" and "subjunctive-as-something-else", neither of which seems like a good option to me.

It's also not clear that the things labelled "subjunctive" in various different languages should correspond to the same theoretical concept. It's plausible that a particular form or morpheme called "subjunctive" in one language might really just be an irrealis marker, while a "subjunctive" in another language is demonstrably not an irrealis marker (as in Romance). Another troubling aspect is that the vast majority of the formal semantic work on verbal mood has focused on European languages—in more specifically, on Romance languages. As Portner (2018) notes,

A major difficulty in following the line of research just outlined concerns crosslinguistic variation. Almost all semantically-oriented work on verbal mood focuses on a small number of European languages, and while the mood systems of those languages have much in common, there are also significant differences...If we look beyond these European languages whose verbal mood systems have been the subject of formal theories, the variation is much greater, and it is by no means clear that we are dealing with a unified category.

If we take these words to heart, then it might well be true that there's not even a crosslinguistically coherent category of "verbal mood".

He also briefly talks about the realis/irrealis distinction ("reality status"). He notes that those terms are much more commonly used in the descriptive and typological literature, and there's next to no literature on reality status in the formal semantic literature (and he's right—I've tried looking for it multiple times, and haven't found anything good). So he doesn't have much to say about it. He does talk about whether reality status (like the notion of subjunctive) is a unified notion, and whether it can accurately be represented as marking "truth in the actual world" vs. "truth in some other world". Some of the tentative answers he provides are no, it's not obvious that reality status is a unified notion in need of a unified theory, and no, it's not obvious that that's an accurate characterization of reality status. In language after language, the contexts where irrealis shows up aren't always contexts that are "unreal", and often there seems to be something else going on. He ends the discussion by saying:

Given the wide variety of ways in which the terms ‘realis’ and ‘irrealis’ have been used, it is difficult to predict whether the bulk of phenomena which have been described in terms of reality status should be treated as core mood—that is, as examples of mood which can be analyzed using the basic conceptual framework used to analyze verbal mood and sentence mood.

And given his survey, I'm not sure I see why mood and verbal modality are distinct except morphologically. The prototypical meaning of the irrealis is that some event is, well, less real; but exactly what unrealities are covered is highly variable. The future may be realis or irrealis; imperatives can be either; likewise the habitual past. So far as I can see, these are all covered by the idea of displacement.

I think the contrast, at least how formal semanticists understand it, has to do with the precise formal denotation of modals. We have a unified formal way of thinking about modality; and it's not at all clear that we can straightforwardly apply that to mood.

Since Kratzer (1977, 1981), modals have been taken to be quantifiers over possible worlds, with the domain of quantification (the precise set of possible worlds you're quantifying over) being provided by the context via a "conversational background" (or a "modal base"). Conversational backgrounds are sets of propositions, like a set of laws (a deontic conversational background), a set of facts we know about the world (an epistemic conversational background), etc. The kind of conversational background you get is known as modal "flavor". These conversational backgrounds can be converted to sets of worlds: our set of laws can be converted into a set of worlds where all those laws are obeyed, the set of facts can be converted into a world where all those facts hold true, etc.

And then you have modal "force"—the strength of the quantification. The common distinction is between necessity (like must, have to) and possibility (like may, can). Necessity corresponds to universal quantification over the modal base: must p can be paraphrased as "for all worlds w in the modal base, p is true in w". Possibility corresponds to existential quantification over the modal base: may p can be paraphrased as "there exists a world w in the modal base such that p is true in w". So all modals are given meanings that roughly have this same shape, and if a given expression or morpheme doesn't have a meaning amenable to this kind of analysis, then it's not a modal. (This is somewhat of an oversimplification, but it suffices for our purposes.)

The contrast between verbal mood and modality basically boils down to this, from what I can tell: if you can analyze some expression as a quantifier over possible worlds, then it counts as a modal. If you can't, but the expression in question somehow feels "tied to" modality, and it's somehow "verb-y", then it's verbal mood. Again, vague—but I think vagueness is the state of our current understanding of verbal mood, unfortunately.

[Jonlang]

I've been reading up on consonant gradation in Finnish and it looks like pretty straightforward stuff. However, some Finnish words appear to display a type of gradation which never seems to be explained in articles concerning it, therefore I can only assume that it is some other phenomenon. Finnish seems to change <s> to <d> in certain words: vesi 'water' becomes veden 'waters', for example. Why is this? I don't mean how does [s] > [d] as a sound change, but why does this alternation appear in Finnish words if it is not part of the consonant gradation?

[Pabappa]

/t/ > /s/ before any [i], then it gets regularized throughout the paradigm. The lenis counterpart of /t/ is /d/, which was already a fricative something like [ð] historically and therefore did not change. And today it is a stop. Thus today we have a three-way alternation between /t/, /s/, and /d/, possibly with /s/ taking over for all /t/ in a few words.

[Jonlang]

/t/ > /s/ before any [i], then it gets regularized throughout the paradigm. The lenis counterpart of /t/ is /d/, which was already a fricative something like [ð] historically and therefore did not change. And today it is a stop. Thus today we have a three-way alternation between /t/, /s/, and /d/, possibly with /s/ taking over for all /t/ in a few words.

Okay, thanks!

[Richard W]

I think it's a mistake to say that English modal auxiliaries are "used for expressing (verbal) mood". English does have an expression of verbal mood—a disappearing and archaic subjunctive, as in my desire that he leave. But if English didn't have a subjunctive (and probably several people's Englishes do not), then English could reasonably be argued to lack an expression of verbal mood altogether (in a similar way to how Mandarin could very reasonably be argued to lack an expression of case, for instance).

One things that argues for modal auxiliaries implementing mood is that they can't be combined. If one wants to combine modalities, one often has to resort to a paraphrase, for example, 'to be able to' in place of 'can'.

You're forgetting the imperative!

I once tried to work out whether the modal auxiliaries could be put into the subjunctive. My conclusion was that there was no reason to say that they could be, other than that it simplified the statement of the grammar of some constructions.