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Mood and Modality
Since the publication of F. R. Palmer's Mood and Modality in 1986, when the topic of "modality" was fairly unfamiliar, there has been considerable interest in the subject as well as in grammatical typology in general. Modality is concerned with mood (subjunctive etc.) and with modal markers such as English modal verbs (can, may, must etc.) and is treated as a single grammatical category found in most of the languages of the world. Palmer investigates this category, drawing on a wealth of examples from a wide variety of languages.
- GenresLinguisticsNonfiction
260 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Frank Robert Palmer
14 books7 followersFrank R. Palmer, British linguist, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Academia Europaea and an
Honorary Doctor of Letters. He has lectured on English Grammar and on Linguistics in over thirty different countries.
Honorary Doctor of Letters. He has lectured on English Grammar and on Linguistics in over thirty different countries.
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February 2, 2022
Palmer, F. R.: Mood and Modality
Groefsema, Marjolein: “Can, May, Must, and Should: A Relevance Theoretic Account”
Murray, Sarah: “Evidentiality and Illocutionary Mood in Cheyenne”
Despite its name, linguistic typology doesn’t really have much to do with the typing or categorizing of languages into pigeon holes. What linguistic typology does provide, rather, is a metalanguage, a way to talk about language’s essential nature, together with its surprising and fascinating variation. If we want to talk about a language in all its uniqueness and strangeness, we in a sense seem to have a choice between a typological framework on the one hand, and a framework based in Universal Grammar (UG) on the other. UG might seem like the more attractive option because it promises to reduce apparent diversity to an underlying uniformity. However, typology delivers a more realistic account of language diversity via its very acceptance of that diversity. Palmer’s Mood and Modality samples a diverse enough assembly of languages in order to talk typologically about one domain of grammar. His broad sampling of modality sheds light on an area of grammar which has shown considerable variation, both between distinct languages of the world and within the same language when looked at historically.
In typology, markers of modality are frequently lumped together with aspect and tense, seeming to be part of the modulus of verbs. However, while tense and aspect relate in different ways to the time structure of the event, modality has more to do with what Palmer calls the ‘status of the proposition’. In grammars of the world, however, the different characteristics of tense-aspect-mood are often collapsed together or else they interact in interesting ways. To take a common example from English, ‘I wanted to ask you something’, is marked as past, but when spoken it is usually intended to be present tense. Here, past tense is employed to make the proposition less urgent, more tentative, and so generally more polite. Latin and Classical Greek have elaborate rules for how tense, mood, and aspect merge on a single complex verb form, while Swahili incorporates modality into a single paradigm with other tense and aspect affixes.
As it turns out, languages make distinctions between what is asserted as actual and what is not. This realis/irrealis contrast appears in grammars to mark the differences between past/present v. future, actualized v. imaginary, or stated v. presupposed. Irrealis often covers semantic and performative territory like negation, questioning, wishes, or conditional if-then statements about non-actual scenarios. Irrealis, in other words, discloses through language a potential truth without committing the speaker to the actual referential facts of his or her words.
Languages often make use of subjunctives to mark irrealis, but for languages like English, which lacks a subjunctive (in standard non-prescriptive varieties of English at least), an interaction of modal verbs and tenses take the place of the subjunctive. As with ‘I wanted to ask you something’, tense takes on a modal value which in time will replace its original time semantics for certain verbs in certain contexts. Originally, the past tense forms of SHALL, WILL, CAN, and MAY were SHOULD, WOULD, COULD, and MIGHT. But since languages change, the paradigm is no longer so simple. COULD can still be past of CAN (‘I couldn’t yesterday, but I can today.’), yet SHOULD now interacts with the semantics of obligation, forming a system with MUST, and all of these modals have developed specialized meanings to be used in certain overlapping contexts. Palmer uses notional criteria to define terms which can be of use in the analysis of modality cross-linguistically and diachronically. For example, we might (or may or can or …) divide modality into four categories:
propositional epistemic: what we know to be true
propositional evidential: what we have evidence for
event deontic: permission or obligation
event dynamic: ability and willingness
What complicates things quite a bit is the fact that certain terms are used for more than one category, like the English CAN which can refer to permission or ability. Chinese has a healthy set of modal verbs, which are similar to English in their syntactic patterning, but which differ in their semantic webbing. Here are three:
neng: mostly ‘able to’, but also ‘has permission’
keyi: mostly ‘has permission’ but also ‘able to’
hui: mostly ‘know how to’ but also ‘able to’
The fact that a single modal can have multiple denotations as well as connotations has been seen by some linguists as a problem needing a solution. Groefsema’s work on English modals makes a case for a unitary meaning for each modal rather than treating each modal as ‘polysemous’, having multiple meanings. The multiple usages of certain modals are attributable to two factors. On the one hand, modals like CAN are extended metaphorically, with inner states like ‘knowledge and ability’ being understood in terms of an exterior ‘permission’. On the other hand, this resulting ambiguity is resolved through principles of relevance, with context and construal guiding us from the unitary meaning for each modal to its intended significance. But I believe a better solution would entail the dreaded polysemy. The different uses of a modal might have been metaphorically related centuries ago, but the modals are now leaned as homophonous terms for distinct modal phenomena. Unitary semantics does not work well for English, despite Groefsema’s attempt to formalize certain entailments and presuppositions. And as languages vary from one another, and change over time, a unitary semantics does not appear to jive well when we consider Mandarin neng, keyi, and hui, all of which could be translated into English as ‘can’, but which maybe shouldn’t be.
Irrealis and modal verbs (including tense shifting) are just some of the ways modality surfaces in natural language. Another is evidentials, by which the speaker is grammatically obligated to state their source of information. Murray’s work on Cheyenne reveals the Cheyenne way of encoding evidential information grammatically. A system of Cheyenne ‘modes’ comprises a paradigm of (polysynthetic) verbal morphology through which speakers must mark their stance relative to a proposition. Here are the English glosses of the modally modified Cheyenne verb ‘he sang’:
he sang, I witnessed (direct evidence)
he sang, I gather (inference, supposition, or conjecture)
he sang, they say (reported/hearsay)
he sang, it is told (in narrative)
did you sing? (interogative)
let him sing (hortative)
you, sing! (now) (imperative)
you, sing! (later) (delayed imperative)
Murray believes these form a unified semantic class, and it seems they do, at least in Cheyenne. The first four reveal the source of the information while the last four display irrealis, for they do not map to any commitment toward an assertion. When you give a command or ask a question, you are not making a statement of fact and so do not need to provide a source for that fact. Also, as they are parts of verbs, these modes cannot be negated or challenged directly but only by circumlocution. Thus, the bare negative of the verb ‘he sang, I witnessed’ is ‘he didn’t sing, I witnessed’ and not ‘he sang, I didn’t witness’.
So we catch here, with evidentials, with modals, and with irrealis, a glimpse of how the mind might could work. We, as speakers of a human language, all have ways of saying the same things, no doubt. But Cheyenne REQUIRES a disclosure of the source of information. The unmarked evidential form in Cheyenne translates to "I witnessed it myself.” UG has no answer for why something so essential in one language could be regarded as superfluous, if not invasive, in another. Perhaps one day, there will be a map of the linguistic multiverse, something like UG. But don’t hold your breath. For now, it is better to be surprised at than disappointed with the manner in which languages evolve and change, with speakers constantly referring not just to things and actions but also to the phenomena of referring itself. By failing to refer to referring, UG is not yet recursive.
Groefsema, Marjolein: “Can, May, Must, and Should: A Relevance Theoretic Account”
Murray, Sarah: “Evidentiality and Illocutionary Mood in Cheyenne”
Despite its name, linguistic typology doesn’t really have much to do with the typing or categorizing of languages into pigeon holes. What linguistic typology does provide, rather, is a metalanguage, a way to talk about language’s essential nature, together with its surprising and fascinating variation. If we want to talk about a language in all its uniqueness and strangeness, we in a sense seem to have a choice between a typological framework on the one hand, and a framework based in Universal Grammar (UG) on the other. UG might seem like the more attractive option because it promises to reduce apparent diversity to an underlying uniformity. However, typology delivers a more realistic account of language diversity via its very acceptance of that diversity. Palmer’s Mood and Modality samples a diverse enough assembly of languages in order to talk typologically about one domain of grammar. His broad sampling of modality sheds light on an area of grammar which has shown considerable variation, both between distinct languages of the world and within the same language when looked at historically.
In typology, markers of modality are frequently lumped together with aspect and tense, seeming to be part of the modulus of verbs. However, while tense and aspect relate in different ways to the time structure of the event, modality has more to do with what Palmer calls the ‘status of the proposition’. In grammars of the world, however, the different characteristics of tense-aspect-mood are often collapsed together or else they interact in interesting ways. To take a common example from English, ‘I wanted to ask you something’, is marked as past, but when spoken it is usually intended to be present tense. Here, past tense is employed to make the proposition less urgent, more tentative, and so generally more polite. Latin and Classical Greek have elaborate rules for how tense, mood, and aspect merge on a single complex verb form, while Swahili incorporates modality into a single paradigm with other tense and aspect affixes.
As it turns out, languages make distinctions between what is asserted as actual and what is not. This realis/irrealis contrast appears in grammars to mark the differences between past/present v. future, actualized v. imaginary, or stated v. presupposed. Irrealis often covers semantic and performative territory like negation, questioning, wishes, or conditional if-then statements about non-actual scenarios. Irrealis, in other words, discloses through language a potential truth without committing the speaker to the actual referential facts of his or her words.
Languages often make use of subjunctives to mark irrealis, but for languages like English, which lacks a subjunctive (in standard non-prescriptive varieties of English at least), an interaction of modal verbs and tenses take the place of the subjunctive. As with ‘I wanted to ask you something’, tense takes on a modal value which in time will replace its original time semantics for certain verbs in certain contexts. Originally, the past tense forms of SHALL, WILL, CAN, and MAY were SHOULD, WOULD, COULD, and MIGHT. But since languages change, the paradigm is no longer so simple. COULD can still be past of CAN (‘I couldn’t yesterday, but I can today.’), yet SHOULD now interacts with the semantics of obligation, forming a system with MUST, and all of these modals have developed specialized meanings to be used in certain overlapping contexts. Palmer uses notional criteria to define terms which can be of use in the analysis of modality cross-linguistically and diachronically. For example, we might (or may or can or …) divide modality into four categories:
propositional epistemic: what we know to be true
propositional evidential: what we have evidence for
event deontic: permission or obligation
event dynamic: ability and willingness
What complicates things quite a bit is the fact that certain terms are used for more than one category, like the English CAN which can refer to permission or ability. Chinese has a healthy set of modal verbs, which are similar to English in their syntactic patterning, but which differ in their semantic webbing. Here are three:
neng: mostly ‘able to’, but also ‘has permission’
keyi: mostly ‘has permission’ but also ‘able to’
hui: mostly ‘know how to’ but also ‘able to’
The fact that a single modal can have multiple denotations as well as connotations has been seen by some linguists as a problem needing a solution. Groefsema’s work on English modals makes a case for a unitary meaning for each modal rather than treating each modal as ‘polysemous’, having multiple meanings. The multiple usages of certain modals are attributable to two factors. On the one hand, modals like CAN are extended metaphorically, with inner states like ‘knowledge and ability’ being understood in terms of an exterior ‘permission’. On the other hand, this resulting ambiguity is resolved through principles of relevance, with context and construal guiding us from the unitary meaning for each modal to its intended significance. But I believe a better solution would entail the dreaded polysemy. The different uses of a modal might have been metaphorically related centuries ago, but the modals are now leaned as homophonous terms for distinct modal phenomena. Unitary semantics does not work well for English, despite Groefsema’s attempt to formalize certain entailments and presuppositions. And as languages vary from one another, and change over time, a unitary semantics does not appear to jive well when we consider Mandarin neng, keyi, and hui, all of which could be translated into English as ‘can’, but which maybe shouldn’t be.
Irrealis and modal verbs (including tense shifting) are just some of the ways modality surfaces in natural language. Another is evidentials, by which the speaker is grammatically obligated to state their source of information. Murray’s work on Cheyenne reveals the Cheyenne way of encoding evidential information grammatically. A system of Cheyenne ‘modes’ comprises a paradigm of (polysynthetic) verbal morphology through which speakers must mark their stance relative to a proposition. Here are the English glosses of the modally modified Cheyenne verb ‘he sang’:
he sang, I witnessed (direct evidence)
he sang, I gather (inference, supposition, or conjecture)
he sang, they say (reported/hearsay)
he sang, it is told (in narrative)
did you sing? (interogative)
let him sing (hortative)
you, sing! (now) (imperative)
you, sing! (later) (delayed imperative)
Murray believes these form a unified semantic class, and it seems they do, at least in Cheyenne. The first four reveal the source of the information while the last four display irrealis, for they do not map to any commitment toward an assertion. When you give a command or ask a question, you are not making a statement of fact and so do not need to provide a source for that fact. Also, as they are parts of verbs, these modes cannot be negated or challenged directly but only by circumlocution. Thus, the bare negative of the verb ‘he sang, I witnessed’ is ‘he didn’t sing, I witnessed’ and not ‘he sang, I didn’t witness’.
So we catch here, with evidentials, with modals, and with irrealis, a glimpse of how the mind might could work. We, as speakers of a human language, all have ways of saying the same things, no doubt. But Cheyenne REQUIRES a disclosure of the source of information. The unmarked evidential form in Cheyenne translates to "I witnessed it myself.” UG has no answer for why something so essential in one language could be regarded as superfluous, if not invasive, in another. Perhaps one day, there will be a map of the linguistic multiverse, something like UG. But don’t hold your breath. For now, it is better to be surprised at than disappointed with the manner in which languages evolve and change, with speakers constantly referring not just to things and actions but also to the phenomena of referring itself. By failing to refer to referring, UG is not yet recursive.
December 1, 2024
Really enjoyed this deep dive into mood and modality. It's analysis of the mood and modality of several different languages left me stunned. I doubt that there will be a book which so expertly explains mood and modality written in my lifetime. This mood, in conjunction with this modality, is truly one of the greatest of all time. Or it could all be bullshit, I dunno.
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February 5, 2008kindof hard to find this book here...
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