Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality

Silk, Alex

doi:10.1007/s11050-018-9144-4

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 62 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In most cases, imperative verbal mood is either not discussed at all, or it is taken to be the verbal mood of the imperative sentence mood. It is not possible within the scope of this paper to review all previous theories of verbal mood (Farkas 1992b(Farkas , 2003Portner 1997Portner , 2011Portner , 2018bSchlenker 2005;Quer 2009;Portner and Rubinstein 2012;Giannakidou 2015;Silk 2018). There are good reasons to think that imperative mood shares many features with subjunctive (as opposed to indicative); however in this paper I will not get into their relation (see e.g.…”

Section: Background On Verbal Moodmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…There are various ways in which the contribution of verbal mood has been described. A fruitful way put forth in various works with different perspectives (Portner 1997;Schlenker 2005;Matthewson 2010;Silk 2018) is to think of verbal mood as involving a feature which triggers a presuppositional restriction. The analysis of imperative mood developed here largely builds on Schlenker's view of mood as introducing a presupposition on world-denoting variables (Schlenker 2005: 1).…”

Section: Background On Verbal Moodmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Detecting variable force in imperatives: A modalized minimal approach

Oikonomou

2022

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper draws attention to various environments in Greek which show that imperatives convey possibility and not necessity as widely assumed in the literature. The interaction of imperatives with other operators reveals the presence of an existential operator. At the same time, however, it is shown that imperatives cannot be analysed as invariably conveying possibility. Instead, I suggest an analysis in which imperative verbal mood is semantically contentful, triggering a presupposition that results in a domain restriction for the set of evaluation worlds. Combining insights from both the modal (Schwager 2006; Kaufmann 2012) and the minimal approach (Portner 2004, 2007), I show that we can have a modalized minimal analysis if we take imperative verbal mood to be contentful at a presuppositional level. This twist allows us to capture the variable quantificational force of imperatives depending on the environment they appear in.

show abstract

Section: Background On Verbal Moodmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Background On Verbal Moodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting variable force in imperatives: A modalized minimal approach

Oikonomou

2022

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The second family of theories proposes that mood choice is based on a principle which says that indicative is used with predicates which imply commitment, certainty, or a related concept (Farkas 1985;Quer 1998;2001;Homer 2007;Giannakidou 2009;2011;Portner & Rubinstein 2013;Silk 2018;Giannakidou & Mari 2021). For example, Giannakidou proposes that veridical predicates select indicative, where an operator O is veridical iff O(p) entails that M ⊆ p in some relevant modal space M. The subject's belief worlds form a relevant modal space for propositional attitudes (in fact DOX Su is the prototypical M), and hence 'believe' is veridical.…”

Section: Belief Verbs In Theories Of Verbal Moodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mood variation with belief predicates: Modal comparison and the raisability of questions

Mari

Pörtner

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper proposes that subjunctive in the complement of belief sen- tences in Italian expresses a relation between the attitude holder’s beliefs and the common ground. In contrast to most other Romance languages, ‘believe’ commonly and prescriptively takes subjunctive in Italian, though indicative is found as well, and as has been observed in the literature, the choice of indicative or subjunctive has semantic effects. We show that the indicative with ‘believe’ is used when the belief statement describes the personal mental state of the holder of the attitude, an interpretation that follows from the traditional Hintikkean semantics. In contrast, we show that subjunctive with ‘believe’ is used to mark a relation between the content of belief and the discourse context. To analyze these facts, we propose that the modal quantification present in attitude reports comes not from the attitude verb, but instead from the embedded verbal mood. What differentiates Italian from related languages where ‘believe’ only takes indicative, is that Italian allows the subjunctive to access the com- mon ground as a modal base, utilizing the verb’s doxastic background as an ordering source. The fact that subjunctive relates the common ground to the subject’s beliefs explains the discourse oriented meaning of this combination. We extend our analysis to several other predicates that show mood variation in Italian.

show abstract

“…Note that is not true for all equivalent of HOPE in Romance : if many tend to select subjunctive complements, French espérer ('hope') is a regular indicative selector. See againPortner and Rubinstein (2020) andSilk (2018) …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Solipsistic and inter-subjective attitude reports

Laurenti

Mari

2023

IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The utterability of bouletic attitude reports is understood as sensitive to semantic features of their prejacent. Since Heim's seminal work, much has been said on the constraints relative to beliefs and plausibility. Recently, the debate has focused on the distinction between action-oriented desire reports, in contrast to mere desire reports (Condoravdi & Lauer, 2016). Describing the first use, theoreticians have encoded in the semantics of want the requirement for structures of desire compatible with planning and action. These, in addition to ingredients referring to responsibility, have shown the proximity of some desire reports with intention reports. Here we understand these two interpretations as following from a fundamental difference between solispistic and inter-subjective profiles of the attitudes across the epistemic (representational) and the bouletic domain (preferential attitudes). Revisiting the classical Hamblinian view, we propose that attitudes feature speechact like content, which present p for uptake in the common ground. We argue that the uptake with repsentational is 'confirmation' and that with bouletics it is 'realization'. In our analysis, actionability follows as a felicity condition on the inter-subjective use of bouletics and WANT in particular. Focusing on a variety of bouletic expressions in Italian, we also derive their temporal constraints from this more general distinction between private and public attitudes.

show abstract

Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality

Cited by 10 publications

References 62 publications

Detecting variable force in imperatives: A modalized minimal approach

Detecting variable force in imperatives: A modalized minimal approach

Mood variation with belief predicates: Modal comparison and the raisability of questions

Solipsistic and inter-subjective attitude reports

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About