Modality and Mood

Each of the two terms ‘modality’ and ‘mood’, which are sometimes used to refer to one and the same category, has come to denote very different referents. This chapter reviews the state of the art based on a diachronic cross-linguistic approach and outlines the most relevant issues. In order to be clear and to comply with the requirements of a cross-linguistic approach, ‘modality’ is defined in a restrictive way. ‘Modality’ is a linguistic device used to qualify a state of affairs in terms of the notions of necessity, possibility, and volition as conveyed by dedicated markers expressing those notions. This definition includes both descriptive and pragmatic uses, along with both objective and (inter)subjective uses. ‘Mood’ is understood in the sense of sentence type, possibly associated with a specific verbal marking, such as the ‘verbal moods’ of the Western grammatical tradition. This definition also includes subordinative moods. Modality is a relatively young field of research in modern linguistics. A clear interest in the cross-linguistic investigation of its diachronic evolution has only developed since the 1990s. Unlike modality, the linguistic discussion of verbal mood is much older. However, the diachrony of mood – whether intended as sentence mood or as verbal mood – appears even more difficult to investigate than modality and its investigation seems much less developed. After having provided a general overview of the relevant definitions and approaches, the chapter presents and discusses the most recent and comprehensive overview of the evolution of modality, from pre-modality to post-modality. Due to the lack of a synthesis qualitatively and quantitatively comparable to that developed for modality, the evolution of sentence mood markers along with verbal moods is only briefly presented. A conclusion examining some emerging approaches, the bibliographical references, and some suggested readings round off the chapter.