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.
It does, but the distinction between modal and regular verbs isn't quite as clear as in English.
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?
(I hope that's not franglais - it's from a UN document.)Dans le même temps, nous ne devons cependant pas lire davantage dans ce concept que ce qui était voulu en 2005.
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').
My point is not just that in Romance mood and modality are orthogonal, but that mood and modality are always orthogonal, by definition.Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 1:34 pm 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).
No problem! Glad it was helpful.KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 4:01 pm 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.
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.
This whole post is great stuff, and I look forward to reading some of the cites.priscianic wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 1:02 pm 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.
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".zompist wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 10:20 pmThis whole post is great stuff, and I look forward to reading some of the cites.priscianic wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 1:02 pm 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.
I like the sentence mood/verbal mood distinction. The definition of verbal mood seems rather vague, though.
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:zompist wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 10:20 pm 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.
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.’
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.
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".Portner (2018:69) wrote: 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.
Portner (2018:247) wrote: 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.
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.zompist wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 10:20 pm 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.
Okay, thanks!Pabappa wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 4:53 am /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.
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'.priscianic wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 5:02 pm 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).