What is mood and modality?

Mood is one of a set of distinctive forms that are used to signal modality.

Modality is a facet of illocutionary force, signaled by grammatical devices (that is, moods), that expresses

• the illocutionary point or general intent of a speaker, or
• a speaker’s degree of commitment to the expressed proposition's believability, obligatoriness, desirability, or reality.

The term mood is used by some authors in the same sense modality is.

Others distinguish the two, as we do here, by using mood to refer to the contrastive grammatical expressions of different modalities and reserving modality to refer to the meanings so expressed.

If, in addition, modality is used to refer to meanings expressed by lexical means as well as grammatical, it is effectively a synonym of illocutionary force.

Here are some examples of mood and modality; items that signal certain modalities:

• Verbal inflections
• Auxiliary verbs

• What is irrealis modality?
• What is necessity?
• What is possibility?
• What is realis modality?
• What is alethic modality?
• What is deontic modality?
• What is epistemic modality?

• What is a grammatical category?

Chung and Timberlake 1985 241

Givón 1984 272

Palmer 1986 14–15, 26

Bybee 1985 169

Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985 219

Crystal 1985 198

Hartmann and Stork 1972 142, 144

Richards, Platt, and Weber 1985 183

Mish 1991 762, 770

Context for this page:

• Concept module: mood and modality
• In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): M
• In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
• In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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