Abstract
The St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish) subjunctive mood appears in nine distinct environments, with a range of semantic effects, including weakening an imperative to a polite request, turning a question into an uncertainty statement, and creating an ignorance free relative. The St'át'imcets subjunctive also differs from Indo-European subjunctives in that it is not selected by attitude verbs. In this paper I account for the St'át'imcets subjunctive using Portner's (1997) proposal that moods restrict the conversational background of a governing modal. I argue that the St'át'imcets subjunctive restricts the conversational background of a governing modal, but in a way which obligatorily weakens the modal’s force. This obligatory modal weakening -- not found with Indo-European non-indicative moods -- correlates with the fact that St'át'imcets modals differ from Indo-European modals along the same dimension. While Indo-European modals typically lexically encode quantificational force, but leave conversational background to context, St'át'imcets modals encode conversational background, but leave quantificational force to context (Matthewson, Rullmann & Davis 2007, Rullmann, Matthewson & Davis 2008). doi:10.3765/sp.3.9 BibTeX info
Highlights
Many Indo-European languages possess both modals, lexical items which quantify over possible worlds, and subjunctive moods, agreement paradigms which usually require a licensing modal element
We find the same kind of cross-linguistic variation in the domain of mood as we do with modals
I deal in turn with imperatives, questions, ignorance free relatives, the ‘pretend’ cases, and I return to the fact that in St’át’imcets, the subjunctive is not licensed by any attitude verbs
Summary
Many Indo-European languages possess both modals, lexical items which quantify over possible worlds, and subjunctive moods, agreement paradigms which usually require a licensing modal element. Modals in St’át’imcets lexically encode conversational background, but leave quantificational force up to context. I argue that the St’át’imcets subjunctive mood can be analyzed within exactly this framework, with the twist that in St’át’imcets, the restriction the subjunctive places on the governing modal obligatorily weakens the force of the proposition expressed. While we can account for the St’át’imcets subjunctive using the same theoretical tools as for Indo-European, at a functional level the two languages are using their mood systems to achieve quite different effects. We find the same kind of cross-linguistic variation in the domain of mood as we do with modals This idea is illustrated in the simplified typology in Table 2: lexically restrict lexically restrict quant.
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