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

• Main Author: Lisa Matthewson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Linguistic Society of America 2010-08-01
• Series: Semantics and Pragmatics
• Subjects: subjunctive, mood, irrealis, modals, imperatives, evidentials, questions, free relatives, attitude verbs, Salish
• Online Access: http://semprag.org/article/view/114

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 quantificational force, but leave conversational background to context, St'át'imcets modals encode conversational background, but leave quantificational force to context (Matthewson, Rullmann & Davis 2007, Rullmann, Matthewson & Davis 2008). doi:10.3765/sp.3.9 <a href="http://semantics-online.org/sp-bib/matthewson-2010.bib">BibTeX info</a>