Mood and morphology: An alternative approach to the syntax and semantics of German moods

Abstract

The following paper deals with the category ‘mood’ in German, that is with a certain parameter of verbal inflection which, according to the common view of German grammar, is said to include three values: the indicative ( er gibt, er gab, er hat gegeben, er hatte gegeben), the subjunctive, normally divided into subjunctive I ( er gebe, er habe gegeben) and the subjunctive II ( er gäbe, er hätte gegeben), and the imperative ( gib, gebt, habe/habt gegeben). The central aim of this paper is to present an alternative approach to the syntax and semantics of German moods, arguing against a particular position in German mood research, according to which ‘mood’ is presumed to be a syntactically and semantically heterogeneous phenomenon which does not allow for a unified grammatical description. The paper starts by sketching the main arguments in favour of this position, which in a certain sense might be seen as the natural consequence of two hundred years of mood research in German, and then goes on to develop an alternative view which follows a much older tradition taking mood to be a category not only of finite verbal forms but also of non-finite ones. As will be shown in detail, this is an interpretation which is apt to give the category ‘mood’ a coherent grammatical description in terms of morphological markings and thus provides a background which allows for a systematic account of most of the syntactic as well as the semantic properties of German moods.