Introduction

Abstract

Chapter 1 is the introduction chapter of the book. It begins with a survey of the uses of the term ‘mood’ in linguistic studies. The survey will cover the etymology of the term ‘mood’ and studies on mood in both Western linguistics and modern Chinese linguistics. It is revealed that the term ‘mood’ has been used in at least three ways frequently, namely verbal mood, sentence mood, and notional mood, all of which date back to ancient Greek grammarians and remain popular in modern linguistic studies. The current book, for some reasons, will concentrate on sentence mood. After the survey, we will provide a working definition of mood in Sect. 1.2, and in Sect. 1.3, we will elucidate that mood as a grammatical category is also a grammatical system. The research object of the book is the MOOD system instead of a particular mood type. Then in Sect. 1.4 we will define several terms related to mood and turn to a brief introduction to systemic functional typology in Sect. 1.5. At last, we will present the research objectives and research questions in Sect. 1.6 and the organization of the book in Sect. 1.7.