Mood Choice Research Articles

A unitary account of indicative/subjunctive mood choice

Abstract In some finite clauses only one of the subjunctive and indicative moods might occur, while in others there is option between these two moods. This is the basic distinction between intensional and polarity subjunctive. This paper questions the sustainability of such division in Portuguese, providing a critical analysis of the major arguments sustaining that those two types of subjunctive need to be considered. Instead, it is shown that a semantic analysis of the indicative and subjunctive moods accounts for the distribution of these moods in European Portuguese (EP), no different explanations being needed for the cases of lexical selection and those of mood choice. In both cases Indicative signals that only p-worlds are taken in account, while Subjunctive signals the consideration of non-p worlds. This allows a comprehensive account of the EP data: Subjunctive or Indicative occurs depending on whether the meaning of the sentence leads to the consideration of non-p worlds or not. However, in other varieties of Portuguese, Indicative occurs in some sentences whose meaning involves the consideration of non-p worlds. Such is the case of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), where, in colloquial speech, the use of Indicative is common in complement clauses of querer (‘to want’), a paradigmatic domain of Subjunctive. The conjecture is made that in this variety resorting to one or another mood is used as a pragmatic, discursive, strategy, even if the meaning of the sentence leads to the other mood.

Intention reports and eventuality abstraction in a theory of mood choice

Intention reports and eventuality abstraction in a theory of mood choice

Predicting verbal mood in complement clauses: the role of the <em>semantic category</em>, the <em>tense</em> and the <em>grammatical aspect</em> of the matrix verb

This study deals with the issue of mood choice in complement clauses in French, in which speakers may choose between the indicative or the subjunctive. We report on the results of two experiments using an elicitation task, in which we investigated how the matrix verb, via its distributive patterns (i.e. verbs selecting only the subjunctive vs. only the indicative vs. verbs accepting either mood), tense and grammatical aspect influences mood choice in the complement clause. While the role of the semantics of the matrix verb has been extensively studied in semantic studies, considering its tense and its grammatical aspect is a novel approach to explaining mood choice. Our experiments confirm that mood choice depends on the distributive patterns of the matrix verb: there are verbs selecting only the indicative (e.g. constater ‘notice’), verbs selecting only the subjunctive (e.g. apprécier ‘appreciate’) and verbs which allow both the indicative and the subjunctive, called alternance verbs (e.g. rêver ‘dream’). Crucially, our results reveal important interactions between the matrix verbs’ distributive patterns and their tense, as well as with their grammatical aspect. Specifically, both alternance verbs and subjunctive verbs undergo the influence of tense but the direction of the effect is different for each of these categories. In contrast to alternance and subjunctive verbs, verbs selecting the indicative are not influenced by tense and aspect. At a general level, our experimental study opens a new path towards enriching our knowledge about what factors play a significant role for mood choice in complement clauses and reveals that the polysemy of certain verbs strongly affects their selection of the subjunctive or of the indicative.

Formal and Informal Talks of Lecturers in EFL Classroom Interaction

This research aimed to discover the characteristics of formal and informal talks of lecturers in EFL classroom. This research was conducted in qualitative design. Furthermore, the researcher applied discourse analysis under the study of sociolinguistics as an approach to analyze the language, writing, speech, and conversation (verbal and nonverbal) that was appropriate with the purpose of this research. In order to get the data, the researcher did observation and recording. Lastly, the result of the data analysis was presented in description of words, not number. The research was conducted at English Study Program of IAIN Bone.The result shows that the lecturers used formal and informal language. However, the lecturers used formal talk dominantly rather than the informal talk. The characteristic of formal talk which was frequently used by teacher was full form. The teacher frequently used this characteristic in asking question. Whereas informal talk happened frequently when teacher gave explanation particularly in explaining the material. The formal talks which occurred in EFL classroom particularly in student talk consist of four characteristics. They were neutral lexis, full form, politeness phenomena, careful turn taking and title in which using title mostly occurred in interaction among teacher and students. The informal talks which occurred in EFL classroom particularly in student talks were colloquial lexis, interruption/overlapping, first name and nickname, typical mood choice and modal for probability.

Time-of-day effects in physical performances and psychological responses in young elite male handball players

ABSTRACT The present study examined the effect of time-of-day in psychological responses and short-term maximal performances in elite male handball players. Eighteen male handball players performed, in a counterbalanced order and at three time-of-day (i.e., in the morning at 10:00 h, in the afternoon at 14:00 h and in the evening at 18:00 h) the Repeated Sprint Ability (RSA) and the Ball-Throwing Velocity (BTV) test. Profile of mood states (POMS), simple (SRT) and choice (CRT) reaction times, and Stroop test to evaluate selective attention (SA) and Hooper questionnaires were assessed before the physical tests. Oral temperature (OT) was measured in the beginning of each testing session. The results revealed, for the POMS questionnaire, that the negative mood-states (anxiety, anger, confusion, depression, and fatigue) were higher in the morning while positive mood-state (vigor) was higher in the evening. Also, SRT, CRT and SA were better in the evening. For physical tests, BTV and performance during the RSA test were also better in the evening. OT was higher in the evening than in the morning and the afternoon. The findings suggest that, in elite handball players, cognitive and short-term maximal physical performances were better increased during the day from the morning to the evening.

MOOD CHOICE IN GRADUATE STUDENTS SIMULATED CONVERSATION

This study investigates the mood choice used by Indonesian English foreign language learners. The data were the spoken utterances of simulated conversation by four graduate students of English Education Department. The data were transcribed, encoded, analyzed, and interpreted based on the taxonomy of mood system, within the framework of Hallidays systemic functional linguistics, as proposed mainly by Eggins and Slade (1997) and Eggins (2004). Findings revealed that there are six types of moods, namely declarative, tagged declarative, polar interrogative, wh-interrogative, imperative, and exclamative. In addition, there are non-mood clause, namely minor clause, nonfinite clause, and incomplete clause. The dominant findings of numbers of declarative moods suggested that the exchanges of information dominate the conversation. Also, this may indicates the levels of participants competence in using casual English in foreign language context.

Comment Clauses and mood choice in New York City Spanish

AbstractThis paper focuses on Spanish grammatical mood variation in Comment Clauses (e.g.,es mejor que no vayas(subjunctive) /vas(indicative) ‘it’s better you not go’) in the speech of two generations in New York City. The data come from 36 participants, 18 from each of two generational cohorts. Carried out within the variationist-sociolinguistic research paradigm, we test grammatical mood against eight variables, four external (generation, region, speaker sex, language skill) and four internal (grammatical tense, clause type, lexical identity, negation). Statistical findings reveal that generation significantly conditions subjunctive use (the first generation has a significantly higher rate of use of subjunctive forms than does the second generation); English skill conditions first-generation subjunctive use (those with ‘good or excellent’ English skills have a higher subjunctive rate than those with ‘fair or poor’ English skills); clause type conditions both generations’ subjunctive use (impersonal constructions yield a higher subjunctive rate than personal constructions); lexical identity and negation in the matrix clause both condition first-generation use of mood (gustar‘to like’ favors the indicative;importar‘to be important’ andser+ impersonal expression ‘to be’ both favor the subjunctive). Generational differences are thus observed with respect to both social and linguistic conditioning factors.

ВЛИЯНИЕ ОТРИЦАНИЯ НА ВЫБОР НАКЛОНЕНИЯ В ПРИДАТОЧНЫХ ДОПОЛНИТЕЛЬНЫХ ПРЕДЛОЖЕНИЯХ В ИСПАНСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

The problem of the negation influence on the choice of mood has not received enough attention in Spanish studies. An overview of theoretical works in the field of generative grammar where researchers touch upon the issues of verb semantics, pragmatic nature of the sentence, the use of elements of negative polarity, the aspects of the theory of negation shift brings to the impossibility to consider this problem exclusively within the framework of structural analysis. Most problems raised within the framework of generative research remain unresolved and require further research. The analysis of the material enabled to draw several conclusions. First, negation syntactic shift does not impact the mood choice; being pragmatically determined, it introduces additional connotations into the original sentence. Second, the phenomenon of grammatical negation shift can not be explained by the term of negative polarity and is independent of their use. Pronomination phenomenon is not a factor influencing the choice of the mood, since there is a possibility of using both the subjunctive and the indicative mood within the same sentence in terms of its syntax and lexical composition (excluding the subordinate clause, which is replaced by a pronoun)...

Epistemic commitment and mood alternation: A semantic-pragmatic analysis of Spanish future-framed adverbials

In Spanish subordinate adverbial clauses containing cuando and a present-tense verb, it is assumed that the indicative is used for actions prior to or simultaneous with speech time, while the subjunctive is the only option for unrealized actions. However, in Porteño Spanish, the indicative may occur in future-framed adverbials, as in (1), conveying pragmatic meaning not otherwise encoded in the grammar.(1) Te aviso cuandollego [I].‘I'll let you know when I arrive.’Here I pair naturally-occurring data with constructed examples evaluated by native-speaker respondents to identify the contextual factors conditioning variable mood selection. I demonstrate that, although native-speaker acceptance of the indicative is highly variable, the indicative is felicitous with immediate and temporally-specific actions, and when epistemic certainty is conveyed. The subjunctive, on the other hand, is preferred for distant and unrestricted future actions, or when the speaker is uncertain that the action will occur. These findings reveal previously unattested nuances in Spanish mood variation and lead to a conception of mood choice as a gradient means of conveying pragmatic information about speaker epistemic commitment. Furthermore, I argue for the importance of qualitative analyses that carefully examine and control for the role of context in laying the groundwork for subsequent quantitative analyses.

Dialect Contact and the Acadian French Subjunctive: A Cross-Varietal Study

This study investigates mood choice for five Acadian French communities in Atlantic Canada which have intertwined settlement histories but which differ in terms of type and degree of dialect contact. The two communities with least contact with supralocal French preserve the highly salient imperfect subjunctive, moribund or absent from most other present-day spoken French varieties. While four communities exhibit high selection rates for the present subjunctive, in line with variationist analyses of other French varieties, one community has surprisingly low rates of such usage, along with absence of the imperfect subjunctive. This dichotomy is explained by the local prestige of the smaller of two founder groups for the community, settlers from Haute-Bretagne, France, a dialect area for which the historical record reveals low levels of subjunctive forms. The results highlight the importance not only of demographic factors but also of local identity construction in the formation of new contact varieties.

Interpreting mood choice effects in L2 and L1 Spanish: empirical evidence and theoretical implications

Abstract The rich morphology of Spanish, such as that of tense and verbal mood, encodes a range of features leading to diverse contextual effects on interpretation, some of which are examined in the light of original experimental data in the present study. Specifically, we analyse data on the interpretation of mood in concessive structures by upper-intermediate and advanced learners of L2 Spanish, with L1 French (N=48) and L1 English (N=40), and from an L1 European Spanish control group (N=35). The results of the learner-group interpretation experiment led to a follow-on study enquiring into the understanding of mood alternation in concessive clauses by another group of L1 European Spanish speakers through a metalinguistic interpretation task. Learner group findings suggested a heavier reliance on lexical information and world-knowledge than on grammatical cues, while L1 speakers’ data indicate a default association maintained between subjunctive and irrealis interpretations, leading to a greater measure of variability in describing presuppositional uses of this mood. The native speaker data may reflect challenges posed by representing and describing, using metalinguistic knowledge, structures whose interpretation requires the integration of linguistic, discourse and extralinguistic information. Findings are discussed in relation to current linguistic descriptions and potential contributions of our empirical data.

Desires, wishes and hopes – Desiderative predicates and presuppositions

AbstractThe expression of a desire – a wish, a request, a demand, one’s will – triggers a presupposition. This has grammatical consequences, such as mood choice in Romance, verbal positioning in Germanic or complementizer selection in Slavic. Desiderative predicates are argued to contain special features of (counter-) factivity. This explains the strikingly similar behavior of emotive factive and implicative predicates as well as volitional and request expressions; it also captures some common characteristics with negated affirmative predicates.

Mood choice in complements of Spanishcomprenderand Portuguesecompreender(‘understand’) – distribution and meaning

AbstractThe present paper analyzes the occurrence of indicative and subjunctive complements of the verbscomprender(Spanish) andcompreender(Portuguese) in European Spanish and European Portuguese. A quantitative analysis based on 400 occurrences of the complements randomly selected from the newspaper genre shows that the indicative mood occurs more frequently than the subjunctive mood in both languages, although the subjunctive mood is more frequent in the Portuguese corpus than in the Spanish one. The analysis also shows that the occurrence of the subjunctive complement is highly restricted to contexts in which the subject of the main clause verb is either 1st person or 3rd person singular. From the theoretical perspective of Cognitive Grammar, the mood alternation is explained by the concept ofdominion, i.e. the indicative complement designates an event that is located within the conceptualizer’s epistemic dominion, whereas the subjunctive complement designates an event that is located outside the conceptualizer’s dominion of effective control.

Main Clause Phenomena in Korean (vs. V2 in German)

The goal of this paper is to examine what kind of universals and parameters exist in Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), conducting a comparative study between Korean and German. First, we show that complements allowing MCP reveal a structural ambiguity between root or subordinating clauses, which implies that these cases of semi-Roots are only an optional operation in Korean. Second, we discuss the typology of MCP with respect to true Roots and semi-Roots in Korean. Third, we discuss three semantic properties of MCP in Korean: (i) non-presupposition is a prerequisite in triggering MCP, supporting earlier accounts; (ii) the (non-)presuppositional property reflected in complementizer selection precisely patterns with the (non-)factivity of matrix predicates; and (iii) various semantic–pragmatic sources for MCP such as illocutionary forces, expressive/emotional attitude, mirative evidentials, (anti)honorification, and mood choice in Korean are identified. Fourth, we show that Korean complements with MCP and German V2 constructions exhibit striking parallels in terms of distribution, which implies that MCP in these typologically unrelated languages can be captured by a single principle. Finally, we propose a unified account for the syntax of true Roots, semi-Roots, and non-Roots, building on Wurmbrand's (2012, 2014) timing-of-Merge account. This dynamic syntax allows us to capture the crosslinguistic variation such as structural ambiguity of MCP constructions in Korean and the mismatches between syntactic and LF/PF properties in V2 in German.The current analysis has important consequences: First, this study has empirical confirmation that the types of MCP-trigger must be extended to comprise the newly identified cases in Korean. Second, the structural ambiguity for MCP constructions in Korean gives us the generalization that MCP operate on syntax, even though they are semantically or pragmatically motivated. Finally, the comparative analysis of genetically distant languages opens the possibility to provide a principled account of the MCP-activating force heads across languages, incorporating the empirical findings of prior research on individual factors such as emotional attitude, evidentiality, or mood.

A Study of Interpersonal Function of Presidential Speeches

This paper applies Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to the study of interpersonal function in each two presidential speeches delivered by Barrack Obama and George W. Bush. It is found that there are several features in their presidential speeches. With respect to mood choice, declaratives account for 98.31% and imperatives 1.69%. Explicit subjective modalization is widely employed. These dominant features are closely connected to the communicative purpose of presidential speeches. This study proves that the theoretical framework of interpersonal function can be applied to the study of political discourse. It also deepens our understanding of the interpersonal function of presidential speeches and thus provides a new perspective in the study of political discourse.

Assertability conditions of epistemic (and fictional) attitudes and mood variation

Italian is a well-known exception to the cross-linguistic generalization according to which `belief' predicates are indicative selectors across languages. We newly propose that languages that select the subjunctive with epistemic predicates allow us to see a systematic polysemy between what we call an expressive-`belief' (featuring only a doxastic dimension) and an inquisitive-`belief' (featuring both a doxastic and an epistemic dimension conveying doxastic certainty (in the assertion) and epistemic uncertainty (in the presupposition)). We offer several previously unseen contrasts proving this distinction and offer a new analysis for mood choice cross-linguistically. We argue that the distinction between expressive and inquisitive attitudes is not an idiosyncrasy of non-factive epistemics. We provide novel data, showing that fictional predicates (dream, imagine) license the subjunctive. We explain the indicative/subjunctive alternation by again appealing to epistemic uncertainty and disentangling expressive from inquisitive-fictional meanings. We thus pave the way for a new typology of attitudes relying on this systematic polysemy and propose new criteria to explain mood distribution cross-linguistically.

Subjunctive and subject pronoun realization: a study of "no creo que"

Subjunctive mood in complement clauses is licensed under selection from certain predicates or under the scope of a modal or negation. In contexts where mood choice varies, such as the complement of a negated epistemic verb no creer, it introduces a contrast in interpretation. The subjunctive is thought to contribute to a shift in the modal anchoring of the embedded clause, and is consequently interpreted as indicative of a dissociation between the epistemic models of the speaker and the subject. We provide evidence that these uses also interact with pragmatic context. Given independent claims that 1) the overt realization of first person subject pronouns is contrastive and 2) it generally serves to anchor discourse to the speaker’s perspective and 3) overt use is particularly frequent with epistemic verbs, we examined the interaction between negation, first person subject pronoun realization, and mood of the dependent clause for the verb creer. An analysis of oral speech from the Proyecto de Habla Culta revealed that for negative sentences (no creo que), yo is overtly realized more frequently for cases with exceptional indicative dependents than for those with canonical subjunctive dependents; there was no association with mood for affirmative uses of creer. These results support analyses where negation has specific scope over the contrastive subject, rather than over the epistemic clause. As a consequence, the matrix proposition remains an assertion and use of indicative complements is licensed.

Age and input effects in the acquisition of mood in Heritage Portuguese.

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environment. The results show a significant effect of the age at testing and the amount of input in the acquisition of the subjunctive. In general, acquisition is delayed with respect to monolinguals, even though higher convergence with the monolingual grammar is observed after twelve years of age. Results also reveal that children with more exposure to the heritage language at home show faster acquisition than children from mixed households: the eight- to nine-year-old age boundary seems relevant for those speakers with more exposure, and the twelve- to thirteen-year-old age boundary for those with less exposure.

Mood alternation in Spanish conditional clauses: Condition, cause and the dominion hypothesis

The present paper analyzes the mood alternation between Spanish conditional clauses introduced by the particlesi‘if’, on the one hand, and by conditional conjunctions such asa condición de que‘on the condition that’,con tal de que‘provided that’ andsiempre y cuando‘as long as’, on the other hand. Situated within the theoretical perspective of Cognitive Grammar, the paper argues that the conceptual content of the linguistic unit that introduces the conditional clause determines mood choice. In particular, it is claimed that the indicative mood insi-clauses reflects theconceptualizer’sreasoning about the causal relation between two events. By contrast, the occurrence of the subjunctive mood in other conditional clauses is analyzed as a natural effect of the condition expressed by the conditional conjunction. The analysis further shows that the mood alternation can be explained by the concept ofdominion. The particlesiintroduces a clause that is located within the conceptualizer’sepistemic dominion, whereas other conditional conjunctions introduce clauses that are located outsidethe dominion of effective control.

Interfaces in the interpretation of mood alternation in L2 Spanish

In this paper, we present the results of one written task testing the interpretation of mood choice in if-conditional constructions in L2 Spanish: a linguistic task of conditional utterances containing both regular and irregular indicative and subjunctive forms was completed by 48 L1 French and 40 L1 English speakers, and by an L1 Spanish control group (n = 35). Results show a similar pattern in the answers of both experimental groups despite the varying degree of similarity and disparity among the languages. We adopt a cognitive pragmatic perspective for the analysis of the results in connection with the various kinds of effects created by mood alternation in the constructions studied. Furthermore, in relation to current SLA debates (Lardiere 2008, 2009), our findings demonstrate that feature re-assembly in L2 Spanish is not trouble-free, as simple current feature accounts would advocate, even if those features exist in the learners’ L1.