[Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?

[Martin Haspelmath]

It seems to me that it is a question about terminology (rather than 
about substance) whether one "regards" the Finnish Potential Mood marker 
/-ne/ as a mood marker or not. "Regarding X as Y" really is the same as 
"calling X by the name Y".


So how do we want to use the term "mood" in typology and general 
linguistics? It seems to me that we want to treat some semantic domains 
in a privileged way, by saying that "language L inflects for domain D".


We don't treat participles or causatives as privileged in this way (we 
wouldn't say that Finnish "inflects for participle", or "inflects for 
causative"), and for the most part, this way of talking is limited to 
the following domains:


case, person, number, gender, tense, mood, evidentiality, polarity


These privileged domains are also called "inflectional categories" (or 
"inflectional features"), but I think that it's probably an accident of 
history that they have been treated in this special way (see my 
forthcoming paper on inflection and derivation as traditional 
comparative concepts: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007006).


I don't think it's in any way "problematic" that the Finnish participial 
suffix /-va /can follow the mood suffix /-ne/, but it may well be that 
such an affix order occurs quite rarely. In any event, there is no 
terminological or conceptual problem here. Finnish is a bit different 
from Latin, but so are many other languages.


Best,

Martin



On 13.07.23 14:21, Jussi Ylikoski wrote:
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> I have a question about the notion of /mood/ as a grammatical, and 
> more specifically, morphological category. It should not have come as 
> a surprise to me that on a general, language-specific level, various 
> dictionaries of linguistic terms define and characterize /mood/ quite 
> vaguely, but I am still surprised to see how difficult it is to find 
> explicit statements on whether or not morphological moods are 
> generally limited to finite verb forms or not.
>
> Put concretely, I am wondering whether it is conceptually (or 
> typologically) odd or natural to regard the Finnish "potential mood" 
> marker -/ne/- a mood, as its use is not strictly limited to finite 
> verb forms (2) but can also attested in some – and only some – 
> non-finites such as the present participle (2), in contrast to the 
> unmarked or "indicative" participle seen in (3). The semantic function 
> of the potential in -/ne/- is that of epistemic modality:
>
> (1) Remontti valmistu-ne-e elokuu-ssa.
>
> renovation be.completed-POT-3SG August-INE
>
> 'The renovation will probably be completed in August.'
>
> (2) elokuu-ssa valmistu-ne-va remontti
>
> August-INE be.completed-POT-PTCP.PRS renovation
>
> 'the renovation that will probably be completed in August'
>
> (3) elokuu-ssa valmistu-va remontti
>
> August-INE be.completed-PTCP.PRS renovation
>
> 'the renovation that will be completed in August'
>
> In light of the Finnish (and more generally Uralic) grammatical 
> tradition, participials seen in (2) do not and cannot exist, but if 
> they do as it seems, inflectional moods do not behave like this, and 
> the morpheme -/ne/- in /valmistu-ne-va/ should probably be analyzed as 
> a kind of derivational affix instead.
>
> I would be interested to know whether linguists outside the Finnish 
> tradition see it as problematic or unproblematic to call the morpheme 
> -/ne/- in /valmistu-ne-va/ (2) a participle a marker of a 
> morphological (inflectional) mood. Are there any parallels to forms 
> like this, and possibly studies on these issues?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jussi
>
>
>
> https://users.utu.fi/jumyli/ <https://users.utu.fi/jumyli/>
>
>
>
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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