[Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?

Fri Jul 14 20:31:41 UTC 2023

Dear Jussi – I see that you’re getting as many opinions as you’re getting responses 😊 But I’m going to add mine, simply because none of the other users seems to have mentioned what I see as the primary issue.

Fwiw., from my point of view, the key question here is not finiteness, but semantics. Let’s assume that _-ne_ does indeed have a single “semantic meaning” (as opposed to pragmatic implicatures arising from it in various contexts), and that meaning is, as you say, epistemic modality.

The question then arises whether one wishes to conflate the notional categories (a.k.a. comparative concepts) of ‘mood’ and ‘modality’ or to keep them distinct. Personally, I prefer the latter, since they are quite distinct conceptually and in my experience, their expression tends to be in first approximation independent, or at least distinct, in the languages of the world. But, again, this is a consideration purely of utility – there’s no correct or incorrect answer.

If I were to propose typologically useful working definitions for the comparative concepts ‘mood’ and ‘modality’, I would offer something like this:

  *   Modality classifies propositions into those that are necessarily (not) true and those that are potentially (not) true. (Non-modalized speech acts simply steer clear of this classification.) This distinction can be conceptualized in terms of quantification over possible worlds, force dynamics, or however else one sees fit. And to say that a proposition is necessarily or possibly true requires some, usually contextually determined, set of assumptions against which the modalized speech act is evaluated. In the case of epistemic modality, that set of assumptions is the sum of what the speaker purports to know.

  *   Mood classifies utterances in terms of whether their ‘topic situation’ is (assumed to be) part of the interlocutors’ actual world (the speech situation and its past) or not (the speech situation’s future and counterfactual past situations). An utterance’s topic situation is the situation it makes a statement or promise, asks a question, issues a directive, etc., about.

Now, I’m not aware of any theory of finiteness I’d be ready to endorse, including my own. (I guess you could take this this along the lines of the famous Groucho Marx quip that he’d never join a club that would accept him as a member.) But, based on the above characterization, modality is a propositional operator, whereas mood is a speech-act-level operator. And since propositions are the objects/arguments of speech acts, we should expect to generally find modality further “down” in the syntactic structure, i.e., closer to the lexical content, than mood.

So this means that if _-ne_ is indeed a modal operator, I would consider its showing up in nonfinite projections less surprising than if it were a mood operator.

Lastly, none of the above should be construed as a criticism of the traditional terminological practice of Finnish linguistics. The cognancy of _modal_ and _modus_ alone makes it almost unreasonable to expect terminological traditions to be answerable to the semantic factoids cited above. Particularly when paired with paucity of thorough and typologically sensitive semantic work on the issues.

HTH! – Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Jussi Ylikoski <jussi.ylikoski at utu.fi>
Date: Thursday, July 13, 2023 at 20:22
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?
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/

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