30.4381, Review: Morphology; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics: Nuyts, van der Auwera (2018)

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Subject: 30.4381, Review: Morphology; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics: Nuyts, van der Auwera (2018)

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Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 13:18:24
From: Cameron Morin [cameron.morin at univ-paris-diderot.fr]
Subject: The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-978.html

EDITOR: Jan  Nuyts
EDITOR: Johan  van der Auwera
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Cameron Morin

SUMMARY 

“The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood”, edited by Jan Nuyts and Johan van
der Auwera (2018), provides a state of the art overview of the linguistic
domains of modality and mood across various research perspectives, including
morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, typology, language variation and change,
theoretical frameworks, and more. It is composed of 23 chapters by leading
researchers in the field. The book aims to offer a structured and neutral
approach to modality and mood out of a vast expanse of literature, which has
sometimes displayed wide conceptual and terminological divergence.  

The volume is presented in five main parts, following two introductory
chapters: “The Semantics of Modality and Mood”, “The Expression of Modality
and Mood”, “Sketches of Modality and Mood Systems”, “Wider Perspectives on
Modality and Mood”, and “Theoretical Approaches”.  
In Chapter 1, “Surveying Modality and Mood: an Introduction”, Jan Nuyts
unpacks the main objectives of the volume. In particular, he makes a series of
terminological choices to be respected throughout the book for clarity and
accessibility. He thus relates “modality” specifically to the semantic domains
of “root (dynamic/deontic) modality” and “epistemic modality”, while “mood”
refers to correspondences between sentence types and illocutionary functions,
as well as the notions of indicative/subjunctive, and (ir)realis. He then
summarises the individual parts and chapters of the book.   

In Chapter 2, “The History of Modality and Mood”, Johan van der Auwera and
Alfonso Zamorano Aguilar offer a detailed diachrony of both notions in
philosophy of grammar, from Ancient Greece to contemporary Western Europe.
They focus on the figures of Quintilian, Dionysus Thrax, Protagoras,
Apollonius Dyscolus, Priscian, Kant, Von Wright, and Palmer. The authors show
that “mood” is a much older notion than “modality”; yet the latter was quick
in becoming more prominent than the former, and in acquiring large pieces of
its conceptual territory, thus justifying the choices made in Chapter 1.  

In Chapter 3 (opening Part I), “Analysis of the Modal Meanings”, Jan Nuyts
highlights the main difficulties of precisely defining the intrinsic nature of
“modality” in order to distinguish it from the associated domains of time and
aspect. For instance, he shows the fuzzy boundaries in the traditional
subcategories of dynamic, deontic, and epistemic modality, which have led to
alternative classifications in the literature. Moreover, linguists do not
agree on the shared semantic properties which should base the unification of
several categories as “modal”, resulting in a variety of competing views. 

In Chapter 4, “Interactions between Modality and Other Semantic Categories”,
Mario Squartini completes the previous chapter by studying the complex
relation between modality and other central domains in the TAM(E) system
(Tense-Aspect-Modality(-Evidentiality)). Futurity, the past, and even aspect
to some extent, seem to be intertwined with modality through the notion of
inactuality. Several issues of overlap between modality and evidentiality make
the status of the latter uncertain as a category; negation remains independent
but can be intricately linked to the domains of possibility and necessity.
Again, much seems to depend on theoretical preferences. 

In Chapter 5, “Analyses of the Semantics of Mood”, Irina Nikolaeva provides a
full synthesis of what “mood” comprises semantically and pragmatically, as
defined in Chapter 1. She dwells on each subcategory and its central features
discussed in the literature, thus going over the sentence types of
declarative, interrogative, imperative, optative, and exclamative; she then
moves on to the controversial notions of realis and irrealis, with close
attention to the distinction between indicative and subjunctive. The chapter
calls for further investigation on the interpretive effects brought about by
the use of moods.  

In Chapter 6 (opening Part II), “The Expression of Non-Epistemic Modal
Categories”, Heiko Narrog describes the forms used cross-linguistically to
express dynamic, deontic, and boulomaic modality. These expressions range from
explicit to implicit; they can involve one-to-many and many-to-one mappings of
meaning and form. Non-epistemic modality tends to appear in the scope of
explicit tense marking and epistemic modality, while negation can equally
appear inside and outside its scope. It seems incompatible with the imperative
sentence type, and it rarely concords. Apart from commands and directions in a
broad sense, non-epistemic modality can convey a variety of performative
effects which require further research. 

In Chapter 7, “The Expression of Epistemic Modality”, Kasper Boye completes
the input of Chapter 6 with the cross-linguistic study of epistemic modal
expressions. Epistemic modality is a “grammaticizable notion”; it can be
conveyed through lexical expressions that may constitute modal systems, but
also through grammatical expressions, typically modal auxiliaries, clitics,
and affixes. Epistemic modal expressions can often concord, on the condition
that they should at least semantically overlap. In terms of ordering, they
tend to appear inside illocutionary expressions, and outside temporal,
aspectual, and root modal expressions; there are diverging views on their
ordering with evidential expressions. Their distribution seems governed by a
truth-valued meaning constraint, especially in the cases of imperatives and
non-propositional dependent clauses.  

In Chapter 8, “Sentence Types”, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald describes the
grammatical aspects of sentence types across languages, starting from the
central distinction between statements, questions, and commands. They seem
universally correlated with phonological, morphological, and syntactic
differentiations. They also display remarkable flexibility in their ability to
achieve open-ended sets of communicative acts, which are prototypically
related but not limited to a given type, and which are furthermore determined
by complex pragmatic and cultural variables. Exclamatives can be argued to
constitute a minor sentence type, but their cross-linguistic status is
problematic, since they often overlap with one or more of the other types.  

In Chapter 9, “The Linguistic Marking of (Ir)realis and Subjunctive”, Caterina
Mauri and Andrea Sansò focus on the morphosyntax, distribution, and markedness
of subjunctive and irrealis as forms. They lay stress on the difficulties in
clearly distinguishing the two: the most widespread view is that subjunctives
are verbal inflections which encode either all or a subset of the functions
covered by irrealis, and the latter can be encoded by a variety of different
forms. Usually but not always, subjunctives are more structurally complex,
distributionally constrained, and inflectionally poor than indicatives, which
gives them a marked status. Binary indicative/subjunctive dichotomies are not
fully satisfactory cross-linguistically, because mood systems can be much more
complex. Similar points are made with respect to the relation between irrealis
and realis forms. Diachronic studies identifying the sources of subjunctives
and irrealis forms may help explain their distributional differences across
languages. 

In Chapter 10, “The Linguistic Interaction of Mood with Modality and Other
Categories”, Andrej L. Malchukov and Viktor S. Xrakovskij describe some
semantic constraints governing the co-occurrence of forms expressing mood with
other central categories including modality, tense, aspect, negation, and
person. These interactions appear to involve blocking effects where a
“dominant” category can prohibit a “recessive” one, or induce its
reinterpretation. The authors focus on the case studies of the imperative and
the subjunctive/irrealis to show phenomena ranging from free interaction to
bias and incompatibility with specific subcategories within tense (such as
past and future), aspect (such as perfective/imperfective), negation, and
person. They argue that these phenomena are determined by local markedness,
which subsumes functional compatibility and economy.  

In Chapter 11 (opening Part III), “Modality and Mood in Iroquoian”, Marianne
Mithun examines a family of polysynthetic languages spoken in northeastern
North America and their means of expressing modality and mood. These languages
show inflectional distinctions of both sentence types and realis/irrealis,
while they express modality mainly through full verbal constructions and
particles. They do not feature modal auxiliaries as in Germanic languages, but
some of their forms do suggest processes of grammaticalization: first through
prosodic reduction, then through segmental reduction and loss of inflection.
The diachrony of some forms also supports a cross-linguistic general
development of modal forms from dynamic to deontic and epistemic meanings. 

In Chapter 12, “Modality and Mood in Chadic”, Zygmunt Frajzyngier examines a
particularly large and diverse group of Afroasiatic languages spoken in
Northern and Central Nigeria, Northern Cameroon, Southern Chad, and Niger.
These languages offer a wide range of expressions of mood and modality,
including verb and subject pronoun inflections, verbs, adverbs, prepositions,
particles, intonation patterns, complementizers, linear orders of subject
pronoun–verb or clauses, and ideophones. The author describes the use and
interaction of these forms in the expression of the assertive mood,
hypothetical modality, mirative meanings, polar questions, tag questions,
content questions, the imperative mood, the optative mood, permission, the
prohibitive mood, and normative modality. Further research seems needed on the
semantic categories of modality and mood in these languages, many of which
remain insufficiently documented and even endangered. 

In Chapter 13, “Modality and Mood in Sinitic”, Hilary Chappell and Alain
Peyraube examine three main varieties of Chinese: Standard Mandarin, Hong Kong
Cantonese, and Taiwanese Southern Min. Sinitic languages do not mark mood
inflectionally, while modality is primarily expressed by modal (auxiliary)
verbs and particles. Diachronically, the modal verbs derive from lexical
verbs, and they can be highly polysemous. Modal verbs can become infixes in
the creation of “potential verb compounds”, out of initial “resultative” and
“directional” verb compounds. Moreover, they can interact with negative
adverbs to mark the sentence types of interrogative and imperative. Finally,
Sinitic languages have at their disposal a series of clause-final modal
particles expressing various subjective and intersubjective attitudes. 

In Chapter 14, “Modality and Mood in Oceanic”, Frantisek Lichtenberk examines
a dense subgroup of Austronesian languages spoken in Papua New Guinea,
(Island) Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The expression of modality and
mood in these languages includes verbal inflections, particles, and verbal
expressions including auxiliaries and less-than-fully fledged verbs. The
author dedicates specific sections to the Oceanic expression of epistemic,
deontic, dynamic, desiderative, and timitive modality. Moreover, he shows that
in spite of variation across individual languages, the Oceanic group regularly
distinguishes between realis and irrealis, which suggests that the theoretical
contrast should be maintained in future research.   

In Chapter 15, “Modality and Mood in Standard Average European”, Daniël van
Olmen and Johan van der Auwera examine an areal rather than genetic group of
languages which, based on the convergence of several general features, may
constitute the category of “Standard Average European”; within this areal
category, the authors attempt to locate likely candidates for distinctive
features behind the realisation of modality and mood. Features that are
prominently shared but not distinctive in these languages include the presence
of only one non-indicative non-imperative mood (the subjunctive/conditional),
the presence of neither minimal nor maximal imperative paradigms, verbs in
general as the prototypical marker of modality, and non-canonical word order
in interrogatives. On the other hand, serious candidates for distinctive
features include the compositionality of prohibitives, double modal
multifunctionality of possibility and necessity markers, verbs as the central
marker type of epistemic possibility, the preference for modal verbs with
person inflection and nominative agents, and the grammaticalization of
‘threaten’ verbs.
 
In Chapter 16 (opening Part IV), “The Diachrony of Modality and Mood”, Debra
Ziegeler describes recent and current issues in the historical study of
modality and mood in English/Germanic and across languages. The diachronic
evolution of English modal constructions seems to have been determined by
semantically-motivated grammaticalization processes from dynamic to deontic
and epistemic meanings, reflected by changes in subject-reference selection
and aspect; however, such accounts are not uncontroversial,
cross-linguistically in particular. Comparative approaches to the study of
functionally connected markers suggesting grammaticalization in languages with
little historical evidence are explored through the example of diachronic
mood. Finally, the issue of subjectification in the development of epistemic
modality might be better explained by the weakening of subject-selection
restrictions than by purely pragmatic forces. 

In Chapter 17, “Areality in Modality and Mood”, Björn Hansen and Umberto
Ansaldo discuss how modals, mood, and some non-morphological sentence type
markers might be borrowed in a linguistic area, through the case studies of
Europe and mainland South East Asia. They specifically focus on phenomena
pertaining to “contact-induced grammaticalization”. In Europe, modals are
particularly prone to material- and pattern-based borrowings alike, while
borrowings of non-morphological sentence type markers, as well as mood as an
inflectional category, are significantly rarer. Mainland Southeast Asia is far
less documented in terms of its areal features of modality and mood; however,
the material- and pattern-based replication of “acquire-type” modals from
corresponding full verbs suggests similar processes to be explored in the
future. Overall, these studies of areality require further insight on the
external factors in the complex histories of contact, migration, and changes
of the populations involved. 

In Chapter 18, “Modality and Mood in First Language Acquisition”, Maya
Hickmann and Dominique Bassano synthesise findings on the ways in which the
expression of modality and mood is learned by children across languages. It
appears that the first formal devices emerging to convey modality are modal
auxiliaries, mental verbs, and modal verbal inflections; moreover, the
acquisition sequence seems to be ordered from agent-oriented to epistemic
modality, which may be explained by pragmatic and cognitive factors including
the elaboration of a “theory of mind”. Other factors include syntactic
complexity, the primacy of self reference over others, as well as input and
conversational influence. In the area of mood, declaratives, exclamations, and
injunctions seem to be primitive types in contrast with interrogatives; early
falling/rising intonation patterns seem to map onto a broad
descriptive/pragmatic utterance distinction. Imperatives appear early in
acquisition, verb moods such as conditional and subjunctive appear late.
Overall, there are controversies on the relative roles of cognitive universals
and input factors in explaining these tendencies. 

In Chapter 19, “Modality and Mood in American Sign Language”, Barbara Shaffer
and Terry Janzen explore seldom researched areas of signed languages and their
American strand in particular (ASL). ASL expresses most modal notions by way
of verbs and auxiliaries. Epistemic modals appear utterance-finally, while
agent-oriented modals appear in pre-verbal and clause-final positions. They
are expressed by manual (lexical) gestures which can be accompanied by facial
gestures, head movements and body postures; their gradience is also a central
feature to distinguish them. Grammaticalization seems to have played an
important role in their creation, through former stages of gestures being
lexicalized, then grammaticalized. The authors provide an introduction to the
expression of mood in ASL, which also involves complex combination of lexical
material and other gestures, although it has received very little attention in
the literature. 

In Chapter 20 (opening part V), “Modality and Mood in Formal Syntactic
Approaches”, Katrin Axel-Tober and Remus Gergel discuss some central issues in
the study of modality and mood in several frameworks of generative syntax.
Modals are central categories in these studies, and make up specific syntactic
constituents under the node of inflection (Infl) in the most traditional
models (esp. Government and Binding). This insight is extended to modal
elements in other languages, although not without controversies e.g. in
German, where even the hypothesis of an epistemic sub-class of modals does not
seem to hold invariably. Much research has been involved with the
syntactic/semantic height of epistemic modals, but the complex scoping issues
of root modals deserve future attention too. The authors then review the
debate regarding the relation between epistemic/root modals and verb
raising/control; they also discuss the affinity between modals and coherent
predicates through the case study of German, and unpack a few of the ways in
which adverbials, including adverbs, have been used to explore the
phrase-structural and scoping properties of modals. Finally, inflectional mood
and sentence types are briefly discussed as a relatively marginal topic in
formal syntax, possibly because of the difficulty in the studying them without
reference to the semantic module. 

In Chapter 21, “Modality and Mood in Functional Linguistic Approaches”, Karin
Aijmer focuses on several specifically non-formal approaches to modality and
mood. In Systemic Functional Grammar, mood and modality are considered to
derive from the interpersonal macro-function, and make up a particularly
complex system organised in paradigms. In Functional Grammar, mood and
modality are usually analysed as quite distinct, although both are represented
as a layered scopal hierarchy with differing versions in the literature. Role
and Reference Grammar makes a similar choice, focusing on a grammatical or
structural approach. The specificities of cognitive-functional approaches are
also explored through the case study of modal adjectives and adverbs. Finally,
recent functional approaches have laid stress on the role of interactional or
discourse perspectives in the study of modality as “stance”.  

In Chapter 22, “Modality and Mood in Cognitive Linguistics and Construction
Grammar”, Ronny Boogaart and Egbert Fortuin show how modality and mood were
quickly related to the foundational assumptions of cognitive approaches to
language, through the issue of the polysemy of modal verbs in particular.
Modality has been prominently explored in the semantic framework of force
dynamics, with varying accounts. Mood was also a foundational example in the
theory of mental spaces. An extended description of mood and modality in
Cognitive Grammar is provided, based on the specific notions of grounding and
subjectivity. Finally, the lens of construction grammar allows for a view of
modal constructions as “constraints on polysemy”, which is unpacked through
the examples of complementation, modal verbs, and imperatives. 

In Chapter 23, “Modality and Mood in Formal Semantics”, Magdalena Kaufmann and
Stefan Kaufmann synthesise a vast amount of literature in formal semantics
that historically focused on modality before turning to mood. They describe
the traditional notions of lexicalised modal forces and context-induced modal
flavours, as well as how the latter might be explained by the interplay
between modal base and ordering source. The authors break down formal semantic
accounts of mood into the topics of sentential mood and verbal mood, showing
an area of research subject to much debate; in particular, the analysis of
modal subordination at a trans-sentential and discourse level is a crucial but
challenging enterprise.  

EVALUATION

The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood is a highly enriching book and a
valuable addition to the literature, which should be added to the reading list
of any student interested in investigating one or more of the vast areas
concerned. It achieves the goal of providing a unified and complete
introduction to modality and mood in general linguistics, and it builds up a
rich, updated background for more specific topics and problems.   

One of the most successful aspects of this volume is its coherence and
structure. The terminological choices made in Chapter 1 are respected by all
the authors throughout, and allow the reader to circulate between basic
consensual information and particular points of contention, for instance in
the delineation of semantic categories, which is a particularly thorny issue.
Moreover, the outline of the sections is clear and progressive in its logic,
making the chapters seamlessly tie into each other. There are a couple of
passages which repeat basic information already indicated earlier, but this
might be due to the palpable need for axioms on these subjects; therefore it
is always welcome to come back to them.  

Another strong advantage of the book is its typological diversity. There are
constant references to very different languages, drawn from a repository that
is far from limited to English-speaking and European areas; admittedly, the
category of modal auxiliaries is still omnipresent as the most documented
linguistic expression of modality, but this makes it useful as a benchmark to
appraise phenomena occurring in other locations and language varieties. It is
recommended to be familiar with the graphic conventions of transcribed
utterances from the source language to the target language (English), because
this is where most of the demonstrations in the individual chapters take
place. 

As a synthesis, the volume is also particularly successful in helping the
reader make sense of the vast amount of previous research on modality and
mood, renowned for its lack of terminological consensus and its widely
diverging assumptions. The diachronic dimension of these studies is well
rendered, and allows for a quick and easy selection of the sources needed for
the reader’s specific interests.  

The range of topics covered in this book is impressive. It gives a most
complete overview of the forms and meanings of modality and mood, as well as
cross-linguistic perspectives on their synchrony and diachrony. It also offers
a number of original angles such as areality, language acquisition, and sign
languages. It is hardly fair to ask for more without going beyond the scope of
a book. However, it might have been interesting and useful to have a specific
look at modality and mood in language variation such as in dialects, or the
sociolinguistic and discursive significance of modality and mood in general.
The philosophical implications hinted at throughout the chapters are also
evident and enticing: a specific chapter on modality in philosophy, and
analytical philosophy in particular, would have been ideal, although the
chapter on formal semantics does cover some converging aspects. Finally, the
last section on theoretical approaches opens up numerous research
perspectives, without claiming to be exhaustive; it is an excellent way to end
the book on an exciting note for future enquiries.  

Overall, the Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood is a rewarding reading
experience, and it will likely remain a highly relevant resource in the years
to come.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Cameron Morin is a fourth-year student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure
Paris-Saclay and a future PhD student at the University of Paris. His research
focuses on syntactic variation and change through the case study of multiple
modals in dialects of English, primarily using frameworks of Construction
Grammar. He is also interested in methodological triangulation of corpus
methods and fieldwork methods in linguistic research.





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