Types, Moods, and Force Potentials: Towards a Comprehensive Account of German Sentence Mood Meanings

Abstract

I have agreed to comment on Truckenbrodt’s paper mainly because I am sympathetic with the overall approach which aims at figuring out the non-syntactic correlates of the syntactic distinction between verbinitial1 and verb-final constructions in German sentences, both root and embedded clauses. Figuring out the non-syntactic correlates, however, is not exactly the same as examining the semantic motivation of some syntactic phenomenon. Semantic motivation for Truckenbrodt (henceforth HT) is the connection with illocutionary force. But other kinds of motivation are possible as well. I think in fact that one of the major shortcomings of HT’s approach is his exclusive occupation with illocutionary semantics and his neglect of pragmatics in the sense of information structure.2 With respect to illocutionary semantics (alias force potential or sentence mood meaning) I consider HT as a brother-in-arms because there is considerable overlap between our ideas. Therefore much of the forcerelated part of this paper will take the form of a comparison of our approaches. To anticipate: The main di¤erence consists in the fact that in his approach default interpretations are built into the semantics, whereas in my approach they result from canonical contexts. This contrast results in a relatively strong semantics in the former case and a rather lean semantics in the latter.