Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited: New Answers to Old Questions

457 Pages·2017·4.41 MB·English

by  Joanna Błaszczak (Editor)

Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited

Mood, Aspect, Modality
Revisited
New Answers to Old Questions
Edited by
Joanna Błaszczak
Anastasia Giannakidou
Dorota Klimek- Jankowska
Krzysztof Migdalski
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36352-3 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36366-0 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226363660.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Błaszczak, Joanna, editor. | Giannakidou, Anastasia, editor. | Klimek- Jankowska,
Dorota, editor. | Migdalski, Krzysztof Marek, 1975– editor.
Title: Mood, aspect, modality revisited : new answers to old questions / edited by Joanna
Błaszczak, Anastasia Giannakidou, Dorota Klimek- Jankowska, Krzysztof Migdalski.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016006708 | ISBN 9780226363523 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226363660 (e- book)
Subjects: LCSH: Grammar, Comparative and general— Tense. | Grammar, Comparative
and general— Mood. | Grammar, Comparative and general— Aspect.
Classifi cation: LCC P281 .M655 2016 | DDC 415— dc23 LC rec ord available at http:// lccn
. loc . gov / 2016006708
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface vii
PART I. Tense, Aspect, and Modals: Their Categorial Status
and Cross- linguistic Variation
chapter 1. TAM Coding and Temporal Interpretation in
West African Languages 6
Anne Mucha and Malte Zimmermann
chapter 2. Modals: Meaning Categories? 45
Valentine Hacquard
chapter 3. Epistemic Future and Epistemic MUST:
Nonveridicality, Evidence, and Partial Knowledge 75
Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari
PART II. Irrealis Moods: Subjunctive and Imperative
chapter 4. On Finiteness and the Left Periphery: Focusing
on Subjunctive 125
Manuela Ambar
chapter 5. Evaluative Subjunctive and Nonveridicality 177
Anastasia Giannakidou
chapter 6. The Essence of a Category: Lessons from
the Subjunctive 218
Martina Wiltschko
vi Contents
chapter 7. Imperatives as (Non-)modals 255
Mark Jary and Mikhail Kissine
chapter 8. Approaching the Morphosyntax and Semantics
of Mood 286
Ilse Zimmermann
PART III. Aspectual Recursion and Aspectual Coercion
chapter 9. Aspectual Composition and Recursion 314
Henriëtte de Swart
chapter 10. Can Semantic Theories Be Tested Experimentally?
The Case of Aspectual Coercion 346
Oliver Bott
chapter 11. Aspectual Coercion versus Blocking: Experimental
Evidence from an ERP Study of Polish Converbs 381
Joanna Błaszczak and Dorota Klimek- Jankowska
About the Editors 437
About the Contributors 441
Index 445
Preface
The chapters in this volume were presented at the international TRAIT
workshop “How Categorical Are Categories?” The workshop was
or ga nized at the University of Wrocław in January 2013 as part of the
proje ct “Understanding Linguistic Categories” funded by the Founda-
tion for Polish Science within the FOCUS program.
As the workshop title suggests, the driving force b ehind this volume
is the question of what constitutes a linguistic category. Each chapter
explores this question as it relates to the three traditional categories of
tense, aspect, and mood. We call t hese categories traditional b ecause they
have long been acknowledged and studied by philologists and linguists
and are by now classic in the sense that consensus has been reached that
these categories have certain properties and manifest themselves in pre-
dictable ways that include patterns of expected interaction. Given this
broad agreement, what new can be said about them?
In fact, a lot can be said—if one addresses seriously what the labels
subjunctive, imperative, future, aspect, and modality refer to. The lit er-
at ure tends to assume a straightforward mapping between grammatical
category— for example, future ‘tense’, perfective ‘aspect’, modal ‘verb’—
and semantic function; and the description of well- studied languages (e.g.,
Slavic with res pect to aspect, Romance with res pect to mood, Eng lish
with re spect to modals) cultivates a sense of stability and predictability
in patterns that, however, vanishes once we branch out to lesser- known
viii Preface
patterns and languages. Our goal in this volume is to reveal some of t hese
lesser- known patterns and raise awareness about the consequences the
study of these patterns have for our concept of linguistic category and the
mapping between morphology and syntax on the one hand, and semantics
and pragmatics on the other.
Consider, as a brief illustration, the labels ‘tense’ and ‘mood’. In the
lit er a ture, tense indicates the tense morphology used for temporal ori-
entation. Tense is thus a morphological category—t hat is, the grammati-
cal category realized in the system of a language. In a language such as
Eng lish, the tenses are bound morphemes on the verbs; but in Manda-
rin morphemes that can be characterized as tenses are not attached to
the verb, and they can be particles or adverbs, operating at the sentence
rather than the verb level. In Modern Greek, the future tense appears to
be a particle, in contrast with the other morphological tenses in Greek,
which appear on the verb. Similar variation exists in the morphological
realization of mood: in Romance languages, mood is a verbal category;
but in Greek, mood distinctions appear external to the verb in the form
of particles. In Native American languages, prospective aspect can play
the role of mood or f uture; and in African languages, t here is consid-
erable syncretism in the morphological categories of tense and aspect.
Often it is only by appealing to semantic functions that we can make
meaningful distinctions.
Hence we have already identifi ed two import ant levels of analys is for
what constitutes a linguistic category: the morphological level and the
notional or semantic level. Crucially, the grammatical category of a
par tic u lar expression—t hat is, w hether it is a bound morpheme, a verb,
an adverb, or a particle—d oes not predict its semantic function or its role
within the notional system of the language. For instance, adverbs and
bound morphemes can carry temporal information; likewise, aspectual
markers can be particles, verbs, or suffi xes. In many languages, modality
is expressed by both verbs and adverbs. In Greek and German, modal
particles have meaning that is typically assigned to modal verbs in En-
glish, and in Italian an apparent tense suffi x (the f uture ‘tense’) gets a
modal semantics. Such apparent mismatches are in fact quite common,
suggesting that the mapping between morphological and notional cat-
egories is not isomorphic or universal, and that it needs to be addressed
within the systems of specifi c languages.
The volume provides a forum for discussion of the nature of linguistic
diversity in the syntax and semantics of irrealis moods (subjunctive, im-
Preface ix
perative), modality, and aspectual markers. Are t hese universally sepa-
rate notional or morphological categories with clear- cut distinctions, or
should they be understood as less discrete, conceptually related catego-
ries? If the latter option should turn out to be correct or more convinc-
ing, then how categorical is the semantics of the respective morphemes?
The overarching question we are interested in is how the status of the tra-
ditional grammatical distinctions changes in light of linguistic variation,
with emphasis on the growing body of evidence from languages that have
previously been under- investigated. We approach these questions within
a unifi ed perspective (the question of what a linguistic category is) and by
bringing together theoretical as well as experimental perspectives. The
contributions in this volume can be grouped into three thematic sections:
Section 1: Tense, Aspect, and Modals: Their Categorial Status and Cross-l inguistic
Variation
Section 2: Irrealis Moods: Subjunctive and Imperative
Section 3: Aspectual Recursion and Aspectual Coercion
We offer more commentary in separate introductions to each section.
We want to thank the authors for their valuable contributions, as well
as for working carefully with us to revise and fi nalize their chapters. We
also want to thank our editor, Chris Rhodes, for his help and guidance,
and three anonymous reviewers for reading the manuscript and offering
generous and insightful feedback on each chapter. Fi nally, we acknowl-
edge the support we received from the Foundation for Polish Science as
part of the FOCUS program, without which this publication would not
be pos si ble.
The Editors