[Lingtyp] realis: definition

[Irina Nikolaeva]

Dear Vladimir,

This paper does not provide a definition, but discusses what realis can
mean:
Matic, Dejan and Nikolaeva, Irina (2014) 'Realis mood, focus, and
existential closure in Tundra Yukaghir' <https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18924>.
* Lingua*, (150), pp 202-231.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265170641_Realis_mood_focus_and_existential_closure_in_Tundra_Yukaghir

Best,
Irina




Prof. Irina Nikolaeva, FBA, MAE

https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff31522.php


On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 at 14:54, Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu> wrote:

> Dear Vladimir — I hesitate to offer a definition that’s explicitly
> typological (for reasons I’ll mention below). But in unpublished work
> presented in various places (and versions), I’ve worked with a definition
> of realis mood for Yucatec according to which it locates the topic world
> inside (i.e., as part of) the utterance world. This assumes an ontology in
> which worlds are maximal spacetime entities that “grow” into the future,
> meaning their own past, but not their future, is part of them.
>
> This effectively makes realis mood very similar to non-future tense, with
> the crucial difference that, unlike a non-future tense, it cannot be used
> in past counterfactual contexts. I show that this prediction is borne out
> for Yucatec.
>
> Here is a version of the talk that specifically focuses on the distinction
> between realis mood and nonfuture tense:
>
> http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/Bohnemeyer_2019_tenselessness_Lisbon.pdf
>
> And here is an earlier talk that focuses on the conflation of mood and
> viewpoint aspect in inflectional paradigms in Mayan languages:
>
> http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/Handouts/TLS_JB_v1.pdf
>
> Now, the reason I hesitate when it comes to endorsing the above definition
> for typological purposes is that the “growing worlds” model will cause the
> entire past of the utterance world to be realis and none of the future. But
> I’m pretty sure there are languages in which the remote past is treated as
> irrealis, and others in which parts of the future (or perhaps we should say
> certain types of future time reference) are treated as realis.
>
> For typological purposes, I would suggest that a language has a
> realis-irrealis contrast if it classifies utterances in terms of whether
> they are (purported to be) about the real/factual world or not. What counts
> as “real” varies somewhat from language to language, but from my
> understanding of the typological literature, the crosslinguistic prototype
> seems to be the speech situation and at least part of its past, with the
> likelihood of inclusion perhaps decreasing with distance from the speech
> situation.
>
> Now, when it comes to distinguishing between ‘realis’, ‘declarative’, and
> ‘assertive’, in practice, there is of course a great deal of overlap in how
> these are used. That said, I would reserve the terms ‘declarative’ and
> ‘assertive’ for mood categories that classify utterances exclusively by
> speech act, i.e., all assertions/‘representational’ speech acts (in
> Searle’s terms) occur with the declarative, regardless of whether they
> concerns the real world, a future world, or some (present, past, or future)
> counterfactual scenario.
>
> Lastly, I should mention that Manfred Krifka recently developed a very
> different approach to the semantics of the realis/irrealis contrast in
> Daakie or Port Vato (Oceanic, Vanuatu):
>
>
> https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/26.566
>
> As I recall, Krifka’s proposal is based on presuppositions.
>
> Best — Juergen
>
>
>
> > On Jul 20, 2021, at 4:04 AM, Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > I would be grateful you could recommend me works which provide
> typological definitions of the realis. Crucially, I wonder how it is
> distinguished from the assertive speech act or the declarative.
> >
> > Best,
> > Vladimir
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