We propose the “grammatical profile” as a means of probing the aspectual behavior of verbs. A grammatical profile is the relative frequency distribution of the inflected forms of a word in a corpus. The grammatical profiles of Russian verbs provide data on two crucial issues: a) the overall relationship between perfective and imperfective verbs and b) the identification of verbs that characterize various intersections of aspect, tense and mood (TAM) with lexical classes. There is a long-standing (...) debate over whether Russian aspectual “pairs” are formed only via suffixation (the Isacenko hypothesis) or whether they are formed via both suffixation and prefixation (the traditional view). We test the Isacenko hypothesis using data on the corpus frequency of inflected forms of verbs. We find that the behavior of perfective and imperfective verbs is the same regardless of whether the aspectual relationship is marked by prefixes or suffixes; our finding thus supports the traditional view. Introspective descriptions of Russian aspect have often connected the use of particular inflectional forms with certain uses of aspect; for example, the use of imperative forms with the imperfective aspect to produce expressions that are very polite. Grammatical profiles make it possible to identify verbs that behave as outliers, presenting unusually large proportions of usage in parts of the paradigm. This analysis both gives substance to and extends previous introspective descriptions by identifying the verbs most involved in certain TAM-category interactions. On a methodological level, this study contributes to current discussions on the use of inflected forms vs. lemmas in corpus studies. Newman (Aiming low in linguistics: Low-level generalizations in corpus-based research: National Chiao Tung University, 2008) finds valuable information at the level of the inflectional form, and Gries (forthcoming) argues that inflectional forms do not necessarily provide a better basis for analysis than lemmas. We agree with them that the appropriate level of granularity is determined by both the language and the linguistic phenomenon under analysis. (shrink)

Natural languages exhibit a great variety of verbal paradigms. For instance, in English main verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode discourse reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology (see e.g. Bittner 2005), or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology.

Argumentation schemes bring artificial intelligence into day to day conversation. Interpreting the force of an utterance, be it an assertion, command, or question, remains a task for achieving this goal. But it is not an easy task. An interpretation of force depends on a speaker’s use of words for a hearer at the moment of utterance. Ascribing force relies on grammatical mood, though not in a straightforward or regular way. We face a dilemma: on one hand, deciding force (...) requires an understanding of the speaker’s words; on the other hand, word meaning may shift given the force in which the words are spoken. A precise theory of how mood and force relate helps us handle this dilemma, which, if met, expands the use of argumentation schemes in language processing. Yet, as our analysis shows, force is an inconstant variable, one that contributes to a scheme’s defeasibility. We propose using critical questions to help us decide the force of utterances. (shrink)

By this point, we have developed some articulated analyses of top-level temporal anaphora, including temporal quantification, in languages with grammatical tense and/or aspect systems, represented by English, Polish, and Mandarin. But it is still not clear how this approach might extend to temporal anaphora in a language such as Kalaallisut, which has neither grammatical tense nor grammatical aspect, but instead marks only grammatical mood and person. Most theories of mood and modal reference either ignore (...) temporal reference or analyze modal and temporal reference as unrelated phenomena. Such theories provide no inkling how temporal reference in a tenseless mood-based language can be as precise as in English. (shrink)

Natural languages exhibit a great variety of grammatical paradigms. For instance, in English verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology, or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology. Nevertheless, different grammatical systems are semantically (...) parallel in certain respects. Specifically, I propose that English tenses form a temporal centering system, which monitors and updates topic times, whereas Kalaallisut moods form a modal centering system, which monitors and updates modal discourse referents. To formalize these centering parallels I define a dynamic logic that represents not only changing information but also changing focus of attention in discourse (Update with Centering, formalizing Grosz et al 1995). Different languages can be translated into this typed logic by directly compositional universal rules of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) The resulting centering theory of tense and illocutionary mood draws semantic parallels across different grammatical systems. The centering generalizations span the extremes of the typological spectrum, so they are likely to be universal. In addition, the theory accounts for the translation equivalence of tense and illocutionary mood in a given utterance context. Following Stalnaker (1978) I assume that the very act of speaking up has a ‘commonplace effect’ on the context. It focuses attention on the speech act and thereby introduces default modal and temporal topics. These universal defaults complement language-specific grammars, e.g. English tenses and Kalaallisut moods. In a given utterance context the universal discourse-initial defaults plus language-specific grammatical marking may add up to the same truth conditions.. (shrink)

This work explores the hypothesis that natural language is a tool for changing a language user's state of mind and, more specifically, the hypothesis that a sentence's meaning is constituted by its characteristic role in fulfilling this purpose. This view contrasts with the dominant approach to semantics due to Frege, Tarski and others' work on artificial languages: language is first and foremost a tool for representing the world. Adapted to natural language by Davidson, Lewis, Montague, et. al. this dominant approach (...) has crystalized as truth-conditional semantics: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know the conditions under which that sentence is true. Chapter 1 details the animating ideas of my alternative approach and shows that the representational function of language can be understood in terms of the more general function of changing representational mental states. Chapters 2-4 argue that the additional resources of this more general conception of meaning allow us to explain certain phenomena involving conditionals and grammatical mood that truth-conditional semantics does not. In the analysis of these specific phenomena and the articulation of the general approach on offer, it emerges that this approach combines insights and benefits from both use-theoretic and truth-theoretic work on meaning. (shrink)

According to a common account, grammatical mood is merely a conventional indicator of force with no semantic significance. Focusing on indicatives, interrogatives and imperatives, I advance two reasons to reject this “force treatment” of mood. First, it can be shown that the mood of a subordinate clause can have semantic significance that affects the sense of a sentence in which it is embedded—which the force treatment cannot accommodate. Second, the speech acts of asserting, asking and ordering (...) have something in common even when they do not involve the same descriptive content, namely, the commitment that is present when one speaks seriously for oneself. The force treatment cannot accommodate the fact that when we subtract this positive force from the act, what we are left with is not bare descriptive content, but the mere expression of a proposition, question or order (as appropriate). I conclude by suggesting that the sense of a mood indicator is a function from descriptive content to a proposition, question or order. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to challenge some received assumptions about the logical analysis of modal English, and to show that these assumptions are crucial to certain debates in current philosophy of language. Specifically, I will argue that the standard analysis in terms of quantified modal logic mistakenly fudges important grammatical distinctions, and that the validity of Kripke's modal argument against description theories of proper names crucially depends on ensuing equivocations.

Signed languages employ finely articulated facial and head displays to express grammatical meanings such as mood and modality, complex propositions, information structure, assertions, content and yes/no questions, imperatives, and miratives. In this paper we examine two facial displays: an upper face display in which the eyebrows are pulled together called brow furrow, and a lower face display in which the corners of the mouth are turned down into a distinctive configuration that resembles a frown or upside-down U-shape. Our (...) analysis employs Cognitive Grammar, specifically the control cycle and its manifestation in effective control and epistemic control. Our claim is that effective and epistemic control are associated with embodied actions. Prototypical physical effective control requires effortful activity and the forceful exertion of energy and is commonly correlated with upper face activity, often called the “face of effort.” The lower face display has been shown to be associated with epistemic indetermination, uncertainty, doubt, obviousness, and skepticism. We demonstrate that the control cycle unifies the diverse grammatical functions expressed by each facial display within a language, and that they express similar functions across a wide range of signed languages. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that the study of grammar is irrelevant or unimportant in the business of comparative philosophy, or that it ought to be avoided in favor of methods that presuppose a strongly pragmatic point of view. In this regard, some philosophers have expressed skepticism about whether facts about grammar have anything to offer in the adjudication of competing theories of interpretation or translation. This essay argues that a strongly pragmatic orientation in comparative philosophy invariably overlooks an important role (...) that the study of grammar can play in shedding light on the nature of intention and communicative practice, and that an essential part of the methodology of comparative philosophy should involve a grammatical approach to interpretation and translation. These points are supported by a semantical analysis of passages from Confucius’ Analects that clarifies the relationship between illocutionary force and grammatical mood. (shrink)

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions (words like must, may, can, (...) and possible) and propositional attitude verbs (such as know, believe, remember, dream, and persuade). Combining several strands of analysis-formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language- Giannakidou and Mari's theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages including Italian and French, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English, and explaining interactions between modality, time, and evidentiality. (shrink)

Many (all?) languages regiment differences between main and subordinate clauses and between straightforward assertions and other kinds of expressions. There are two main ways of expressing grammatical differences in natural languages: structural and inflectional. Other resources: lexical, intonational, etc.

“Irrealis” grammatical moods, such as the subjunctive, provoke linguistic, literary, and phenomenological questions. What is the ontological status of the domain revealed by irrealis moods? How does it solicit signification? Is it a mere illusion or a distraction from the real? I propose not only that our ventures into the irreal are indispensable ways of making sense of things, but that the irreal is necessary to the being of language and to our own being.

The main goal of this paper is to present and compare two approaches to formalizing cross-world comparisons like John might have been taller than he is in quantified modal logics. One is the standard method employing degrees and graded positives, according to which the example just given is to be paraphrased as something like The height that John has is such that he might have had a height greater than it, which is amenable to familiar formalization strategies with respect to (...) quantified modal logic. The other approach, based on subjunctive modal logic, mimics the mixed indicative-subjunctive patterns typical of cross-world comparisons in many natural languages by means of explicit mood markers. This latter approach is new and should, for various reasons, appeal to linguists and philosophers. Along the way, I argue that attempts to capture cross-world comparison by means of sentential operators are either inadequate or subject to substantive logical and philosophical objections. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to (...) go beyond the simplest view of propositional attitudes, which treats them as restricted quantifiers over worlds; (ii) the complex connections that must exist between the say report and its source speech act show that one has to be able to differentiate between various layers of meaning for the antecedent sentences; (iii) finally, this paper is a small step towards a typology of propositional attitudes that allows us to uncover the complex web of relationships that grammatical mood is sensitive to. (shrink)

Narrated in the first person, Peter Carey’s novel about the life of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly incorporates other aspects of speech derived both from Carey’s personal experience and from the editorial process. Kelly's voice is toned down to some extent by virtue of the latter, introducing expressions Kelly himself would not have used. Identifying these elements, along with the specific attributes of Kelly’s own speech, enjoins a diversity of cultural and social groupings that intersect and, in some instances, compete with (...) or contradict one another. Shifts in speakers might be signalled by textual markers or by adopting different expressive qualities and speech patterns, which may or may not include a change in grammatical person. In this novel, at one instance, a shift in person is apparent, but I want to argue, not necessarily a shift in the identity of the speaker because, although the grammatical voice shifts, its qualitative features are largely unaltered. The shift nonetheless introduces a significant change. Paradoxically, as far as literary theory is concerned, the subjective qualities produced through voice mean that stylisations of speech may be indicative of character point of view, rather than what is understood to be narrative voice, because they might function in narrative as inflections of speech that do not correspond to the established voice of the grammatically instanced speaker—offering a focalised perspective instead. The shift in True History presents problems in these terms, however: the point of view instanced here is clearly that belonging to the speaker, though the voice is Kelly’s, for the narrator’s point of view determines the generality of the descriptive terms where once these were specific and personal. Had the novel been narrated wholly in third person, an unproblematic reading of Kelly’s point of view, suggested by the use of his voice, would be possible. But the shift undermines this—Kelly’s point of view gives way to another, instanced in the shift that takes place in narrative voice. Carey, in other words, inverts the convention. This is not an instance of free indirect style or discourse, where grammatical mood is at odds with the speaker’s position and tenses align with the implicated subject position of another. The same features of voice that might identify character point of view must, in absence of any disparity of mood or tone, function in respect to narrative voice to convey something of its speaker’s subjectivity, and this seems apparent here: the speaker shares Kelly’s subjective emotional and intellectual perspective, but no longer occupies the subject position. Carey’s voicing of the bushranger therefore complicates distinctions between voice and point of view by revealing qualitative features of voice to be important to the question of who is speaking the narrative. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I investigate a conception of thoughts figuring in ordinary discourse, and argue that this conception is an improvement over a certain standard conception employed in current philosophical and linguistic endeavors. ;In Chapter 2, I discuss the leading principles of the standard conception, a conception according to which thoughts in general are to be identified with propositions. I also briefly preview some of the main features that distinguish the conception developed in the course of this study from the (...) standard conception. ;Chapter 4 is the heart of the thesis. I isolate a reading of the verb 'think' that I contend is both familiar from and central to our ordinary discourse about thoughts and thinking--the "generic reading", I call it. An investigation of the relation expressed by the verb, 'think', on this generic reading, and of the correlative conception of thoughts, occupies the remainder of the study. ;If this ordinary conception of thoughts is to serve the principal functions to which thoughts have standardly been assigned, in philosophical and linguistic endeavors, then there should be a discernible sense in which it is correct to say that thoughts, so conceived, are things that sentences express. In Chapter 5, I discuss the relevant notion of sentential expression. Accounts of this notion have commonly faced a stumbling block in the case of non-declarative sentences. What sort of thoughts, for example, can imperatives or interrogatives be said to express? In Chapter 6, I explain how, on the present conception, there is a clear sense in which sentences of a variety of grammatical moods--imperatives and interrogatives as well as declaratives--may be said, with equal propriety, to express thoughts. ;In Chapter 7, I discuss a fundamental thesis of the standard conception, and argue, in Chapter 8, that any account of the nature of thoughts accommodating this thesis is incompatible with the conception of thoughts arrived at in Chapter 4. Then, in order to retain this familiar conception and its benefits, a new account of the nature of thoughts must be provided. Such an account is described in Chapter 9. (shrink)

Many languages grammatically mark evidentiality, i.e., the source of information. In assertions, evidentials indicate the source of information of the speaker while in questions they indicate the expected source of information of the addressee. This dissertation examines the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and illocutionary mood, set within formal theories of meaning and discourse. The empirical focus is the evidential system of Cheyenne (Algonquian: Montana), which is analyzed based on several years of fieldwork by the author.

We claim that a notion of rhetic acts can fulfil a useful function in speech act theory. Austin’s examples of rhetic acts are saying that something is so and so, telling someone to do something, and asking whether something is so or so. Though this certainly sounds as if he is talking about the illocutionary acts of asserting, giving directions, and asking questions, we explain why the acts Austin mentions are not illocutionary after all. In short, illocutionary acts are acts (...) that commit the participants in a conversation to various things. The illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by what it commits the interlocutors to. Our suggestion is that what looks like illocutionary force in the cases mentioned by Austin is really the contributions grammatical moods make to the literal meaning of utterances. We argue that this contribution is not part of what characterizes illocutionary acts as such. The semantic contribution of mood already characterizes those speech acts that Austin uses to exemplify rhetic acts. These rhetic acts are not committing in the way that illocutionary acts essentially are. So there must be a sense in which such rhetic acts are not illocutionary ones. In the final section, we suggest that the varieties of rhetic acts indicated by Austin fit neatly into a standard linguistic theoretical framework of conversational scoreboards. (shrink)

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range (...) of phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. (shrink)

Proposition and sentence are two separate entities indicating their specific purposes, definitions and problems. A proposition is a logical entity. A proposition asserts that something is or not the case, any proposition may be affirmed or denied, all proportions are either true (1’s) or false (0’s). All proportions are sentences but all sentences are not propositions. Propositions are factual contains three terms: subject, predicate and copula and are always in indicative or declarative mood. While sentence is a grammatical (...) entity, a unit of language that expresses a complete thought; a sentence may express a proposition, but is distinct from the proposition it may be used to express: categories, declarative sentences, exclamatory, imperative and interrogative sentences. Not all sentences are propositions, propositions express sentence. Sentence is a proposition only in condition when it bears truth values i.e. true or false. We use English sentences governed by imprecise rule to state the precise rules of proposition. In logic we use sentence as logical entity having propositional function but grammatical sentences are different from logical sentences while the former are having only two divisions namely subject and predicate and may express wishes, orders, surprise or facts and also have multiple subjects and predicates and the latter must be in a propositional form which states quantity of the subject and the quality of the proposition and multiple subjects and multiple predicate make the proposition multiple. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the quantificational variability of Cheyenne indeterminates: the variety of interpretations they can receive and the grammatical contexts that condition these interpretations. Building on analyses of indeterminates in other languages, such as Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), I present a Hamblin-style analysis of Cheyenne indeter- minates. The proposal builds on the analysis of declaratives and interrogatives argued for in Murray (2010). This analysis can account for the quantificational variability of indeterminates in the scope of propositional operators (...) as well as the scope of illocutionary mood markers. The analysis is formalized in an independently motivated update semantics (Update with Centering, Bittner 2011), which automatically provides the required alternatives. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo tiene como propósito central presentar los resultados de una investigación sobre el funcionamiento de las coletillas interrogativas en un corpus oral del español de Chile desde una perspectiva sistémico funcional del lenguaje. Las categorías de análisis interpersonal se derivan de los estratos semántico-discursivo y léxico-gramatical. En el estrato de los significados se han considerado la función de habla y la mercancía semiótica, mientras que en el estrato de la codificación los modos de cláusula y la ubicación de (...) coletilla en la cláusula. Se concluye que la coletilla es un recurso productivo para la expresión de significados interpersonales en todas las funciones de habla. Se integra mayormente en movimientos que cumplen el rol de “dar”, en tanto que la principal materia de negociación es “información”. Dentro del sistema de MODO, se integran en posición final de cláusulas declarativas y en menor medida en cláusulas imperativas e interrogativas. Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to present the results of an investigation about functioning of tag questions in oral corpus of Chilean Spanish from a systemic-functional language perspective. The categories of interpersonal analysis are derived from the semantic-discursive and lexical-grammatical strata. In the meaning stratum, the speech function and the semiotic commodity have been considered, while in the coding stratum, the clause modes and the location of the tag question in the clause have been considered. It is concluded that the tag question is a productive resource for the expression of interpersonal meanings in all speech functions. It is mostly integrated in moves that fulfill the role of ‘give’, while the main subject of negotiation is ‘information’. Within the mood system, they are mostly integrated in final position of declarative clauses and to a lesser extent in imperative and interrogative clauses. (shrink)

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in (...) Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences. (shrink)

In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods (...) and/or attitudinal verbs. (shrink)

The idea that english has more than one declarative "mood" has been dismissed as superstitious by empirically-minded grammarians of english for centuries--with such spectacular unsuccess, however, that the indicative/subjunctive dichotomy stands today as a cornerstone for philosophical and logical speculation about "conditionals." let me be next into the breach. i shall urge that there is no grammatical basis for any such distinction. and as for the particular adjudications of mood logicians and philosophers actually propose, there is neither (...) rhyme nor reason to them. my bent, then, is basically destructive. but i shall also be outlining a better taxonomy. (shrink)

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive (...) class='Hi'>mood of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language. (shrink)

In this article I consider a two-page autobiographical recount which appears at the end of Nelson Mandela's book Long Walk to Freedom as a summary of his life and what he has learned from it. My aim is to illustrate the role of a detailed analysis of single texts in the field of discourse analysis, as opposed to studies of selected variables across a corpus of texts. The analysis is conducted within the general theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, with (...) special attention to transitivity, mood, theme, grammatical metaphor, lexical relations, conjunction, tense, phase, process type, hierarchy of periodicity, polarity, continuity, elaboration, extension and the analysis of images in multimodal text. Through these procedures I show the way in which Mandela reconciles the linear unfolding of his life history with the deepening understanding of freedom that gives meaning to his life - by means of a spiral texture which returns again and again to the meaning of freedom at different levels of abstraction. The effect, I think, is inspirational - with no tinge of bitterness or betrayal; rather a message of hope and wisdom - grace personified. The approach exemplifies a positive style of discourse analysis that focuses on hope and change, by way of complementing the deconstructive exposé associated with critical discourse analysis. (shrink)

Early Vedic possesses a chameleon-like verb form called the injunctive, whose uses partly overlap with, and alternate with, those of the subjunctive, optative and imperative moods, and with the past and present tenses. Being morphologically tenseless and moodless, the injunctive has attracted interest from a comparative Indo-European perspective because it appears to be an archaic layer of the finite verb morphology. Its place and function in the verb system, however, remains disputed. In Kiparsky 1968 I argued that it is tenseless (...) and moodless not only morphologically but also functionally, and that injunctive forms acquire modal and temporal interpretations only contextually. The injunctive’s only intrinsic grammatical features are aspect, voice and person/number. This paper provides new evidence for that view (section 1), and goes on to argue that such underspecified forms in paradigms support morpheme-based theories of morphology over realizational theories such as Paradigm Function Morphology (section 2), and that the rise and loss of the injunctive is connected to other changes in the pre- and post-Vedic aspect, tense, and mood system (section 3). (shrink)

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

This work, the first book-length study of its topic, is an important contribution to the literature of philosophical logic and philosophy of language, with implications for other branches of philosophy, including philosophy of mathematics. However, five of the book's ten chapters , including many of the author's most original contributions, are devoted to issues about natural language, and lie pretty well outside the scope of this journal, not to mention that of the reviewer's competence. For this reason I will here (...) largely confine my attention to the other half of the book, and so will be far from doing full justice to the book as a whole; indeed, there is such a wealth of detail in the book that I will be unable to do full justice even to the five chapters selected for comment.Non-distributive predicates.To begin with some points that have often been remarked, formulas in classical first-order logic are built up from predicates by means of a limited range of logical operators . Natural language involves many other such operators, beginning with temporal and modal operators, that are of great philosophical interest, but these are ignored by classical first-order logic. The reasons why it ignores them are surely that classical first-order logic was developed primarily for analyzing mathematical arguments, and that such grammatical categories as tense and mood play no significant role in mathematics.It has been less often remarked that the range of predicates considered in classical first-order logic is also limited. From Frege onwards, predicates have been taken to be essentially sentences with one or more gaps or places suitable to be filled in by singular noun phrases. Natural language involves also plural predicates, as well as mixed predicates with some …. (shrink)

Austin argued that ‘if’ has sometimes a non-conditional function, his reason being that some types of if-statement are deviant by two criteria which establish a norm. Following Pears more or less closely, I shall refer to applications of these criteria as the contrapositive and nondetachment tests, and to any if-statement which fails at least one test as a pseudoconditional, or more briefly as a pseudo. Thus, to turn directly to the narrower subject of this paper- the singularity Austin exposed in (...) a thesis of Moore's - ‘He can, if he chooses’ fails either test. It does not entail ‘lf he cannot, he does not choose to’. Nor does it entail ‘He can’. Hence, it is doubly pseudo - and the same applies after systematic variation in grammatical person, tense and mood. (shrink)

It must have been shortly after I entered college in my middle ̓teens that I first heard of the grammatical doctrine that psychological opposites take the same construction. As a mnemonic, alone, the doctrine is immensely worth while and practically helps with categories like —which rouses a literary interest by recalling Thackeray's use of different to as a counter term to equal to, similar to, like to. And, to get back to grammar, for English folk it clarifies prope ab (...) to counter it with procul ab. By the doctrine of opposites we clarify even so elusive a matter as the ‘subjunctive of repudiation’ which I once sought to explain by partial obliquity , not mistaking therein, I am fain to believe, the valuable stylistic note of echo. In this subjunctive I now see a clear opposite to the concessive. It is a survival, on the cold page, of a speech form that owed its meaning to the speaker's mood (xs22EF ψυχικxs22EF διxs22EFθεσις, the pitch of his voice, all the things that manifest and betray emotion, and so far forth is ‘polemic’ It is often introduced by ut, utne, egone ut, where ut is exclamatory and interrogative at once, and the tone converts the concessive to an anticoncessive, indicating repudiation, disavowal. (shrink)

Online support groups are common sources of both health information and social support. To augment existing qualitative understandings of member roles and identities in OSGs, this article presents a corpus-based investigation of shifts in member lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic choices in a bipolar disorder OSG. In total, 8.4 million words in 57,000 posts were transformed into a structured, grammatically annotated corpus and investigated using systemic functional linguistics as a theoretical framework, focusing on interpersonal and experiential meanings. The findings of mood (...) and transitivity analyses show marked differences between new and veteran members’ language choices over the course of membership in the OSG: particularly, in how veteran members provide advice, and in how new and veteran members ascribe and attribute bipolar disorder to both the self and others. Discussion addresses the affordances and limitations of corpus linguistics and SFL as strategies for providing quantitative support for key claims of earlier research in this field. (shrink)

Verb phrases seems to be head initial in affirmative sentences in Lokaa (a Niger-Congo language of the Cross River area of Nigeria) but head final in negative clauses and gerunds. This article aspires to give a comprehensive description of this phenomenon, together with a theoretical analysis. It considers how a full range of grammatical elements are ordered in both kinds of clauses—including direct objects, second objects, particles, weak pronouns, complement clauses, serial verbs, adverbs, prepositional phrases, tense/mood particles, and (...) auxiliary verbs. The pattern that emerges is a bit different from the one found in some superficially similar languages, such as Vata, Bambara, Nupe, and Nweh. I argue that the details are correctly explained by a “remnant movement” theory in which the Lokaa verb first moves out of the verb phrase to combine with tense/agreement inflection, and then the rest of the verb phrase moves as a unit into a specifier position at the top of the clause. This position is available because the notional subject undergoes dislocation in Lokaa, as has been claimed for many of its Bantu kin. (shrink)

"This book addresses recent developments in the study of tense from a cross-paradigm and cross-linguistic point of view. Leading international scholars explore challenging ideas about tense at the interfaces between semantics and syntax as well as syntax and morphology. The book is divided into three main subsections: 1) Tense in tenseless languages; 2) Tense, mood, and modality, and 3) Descriptive approaches to some tense phenonema. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience, some languages encode reference to (...) time without any grammatical tense morphology of the verb. Some of these exceptional "tenseless" languages are investigated in this volume: Kalaallisut, Paraguayan Guaraní and Movima. Modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both tense and modality. In this volume, an untypical modal is analyzed, a modal analysis of imperatives is argued for, and sentential mood, which is closely related to modality, is analyzed. It is always interesting to look at the expression of tense in understudied languages, which is done here for Scottish Gaelic, Austronesian Rukai and German dialects. The volume can be used for graduate and undergraduate level teaching."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This chapter is a response to Étienne Balibar's paper 'Ontological Difference, Anthropological Difference, and Equal Liberty', which was first published in European Journal of Philosophy and is republished in this book (Meeting Balibar, edited by Soraya Nour Sckell, Edições Húmus, 2023). Robert Vinten's chapter ('A grammatical investigation?') reflects upon grammar and ontology - as well as on war and Islamophobia.

Being in a mood—such as an anxious, irritable, depressed, tranquil, or cheerful mood—tends to alter the way we react emotionally to the particular objects we encounter. But how, exactly, do moods alter the way we experience particular objects? Perceptualism, a popular approach to understanding affective experiences, holds that moods function like "colored lenses," altering the way we perceive the evaluative properties of the objects we encounter. In this essay, I offer a phenomenological analysis of the experience of being (...) in a mood that illustrates the limitations of the colored lens metaphor and demonstrates the basic inadequacy of the perceptualist account of moods. I argue that when we are in a mood, it is common to experience a kind of "emotional disconnection" in which we perceive evaluative properties that would normally elicit strong emotional reactions from us, but nonetheless we find that, in our present mood, we remain emotionally numb to these perceptions. Such experiences of "seeing but not feeling" are difficult to understand from within the perceptualist paradigm. Building on the work of Martin Heidegger, I sketch an alternative, phenomenological analysis of moods that can better account for experiences of emotional disconnection. On this alternative account, being in a mood does not merely alter the content of our perceptions but, rather, alters the way we interpret the overall significance of what we perceive, relative to a certain situational context. (shrink)

In Spanish (and other Romance languages) certain predicates select the subjunctive mood in the embedded clause, while others select the indicative mood. In this paper, I present a new analysis for the predicates that select the subjunctive mood in Spanish that is based on a semantics of comparison. The main generalization proposed here is the following: in Spanish, a predicate selects the subjunctive mood in its embedded proposition if the proposition is compared to its contextual alternatives (...) on a scale introduced by the predicate. In this proposal, predicates that select the subjunctive mood are thus analyzed as gradable predicates. Furthermore, the subjunctive mood morpheme is claimed to make a semantic contribution, namely to evaluate the contextual alternatives that are compared by the predicate. In comparing this proposal to other approaches, I show that it can more straightforwardly account for a number of properties of these predicates (entailment relations, practical inferences, and contexts with more than two alternatives). New empirical evidence for two crucial properties of the predicates that select the subjunctive mood is provided: these predicates are focus sensitive and they are gradable, two properties that follow directly from the proposal developed here. In the vast literature on mood, the link between the appearance of the subjunctive mood and these important properties has never been made before. (shrink)

Different kinds of medical technologies and biotechnologies have all been developed for “therapeutic purposes,” but the possible uses of these technologies are not restricted to therapy. These possibilities give rise to a number of questions. This chapter discusses whether mood enhancement is a legitimate goal of medicine when medical resources are limited and the medical enterprise is publicly funded. It focusses on the case of mood enhancement through so‐called cosmetic psychopharmaceuticals. It suggests that we should give absolute priority (...) to those who suffer most; we should give equal weight to all improvements in well‐being, regardless of where on the scale they occur; the better a person feels, the less is the value of a certain improvement; once a certain level of subjective well‐being is achieved, further improvement is worth nothing from a medical perspective, and an improvement beyond normal mood still has value, but it is worth less. (shrink)

The core feature that distinguishes moods from emotions is that moods, in contrast to emotions, are diffuse and global. This article outlines a dispositional theory of moods (DTM) that accounts for this and other features of mood experience. DTM holds that moods are temporary dispositions to have or to generate particular kinds of emotion-relevant appraisals. Furthermore, DTM assumes that the cognitions and appraisals one is disposed to have in a given mood partly constitute the experience of mood. (...) This article outlines a number of implications of DTM (e.g., regarding the noncognitive causation and rationality of moods) and summarizes empirical results supporting the theory. (shrink)

The philosophical debate around the nature of moods has mostly focused on their apparent undirectedness: unlike mental states such as perceptual experiences, thoughts, and emotions, moods do not seem to be directed at any specific object, and indeed they do not seem to be directed at anything at all. In this paper, I want to draw attention to a different feature of moods, one that is as important and in need of explanation as their apparent undirectedness, but which has been (...) overlooked by most participants in the debate: the fact that moods involve a particularly marked salience of the subjective aspect of experience. I argue that any adequate theory of moods should account for this fact. I call this the “subjective salience desideratum.” In the bulk of the paper, I articulate and motivate the desideratum, show that extant theories of moods do not satisfy it, and offer a preliminary overview of possible (yet unexplored) theories that have the subjective salience desideratum at their core. (shrink)

The two main subjectivist accounts of wellbeing, hedonism and desire-satisfactionism, focus on pleasure and desire (respectively) as the subjective states relevant to evaluating the goodness of a life. In this paper, I argue that another type of subjective state, mood, is much more central to wellbeing. After a general characterization of some central features of mood (§1), I argue that the folk concept of happiness construes it in terms of preponderance of good mood (§2). I then leverage (...) this connection between mood and happiness to argue that having certain mood patterns in one’s life is sufficient for having a good life (§3), and explore their potential necessity for a good life (§4). I close with discussion of the role that mood patterns might play within the three leading philosophical theories of wellbeing: hedonism (§5), desire-satisfactionism (§6), and objective-list theory (§7). (shrink)

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply (...) reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic. (shrink)