The role of mood marking in complex sentences: A case study of Australian languages

This study investigates the role of mood markers in the semantic composition of complex sentence constructions, on the basis of a sample of Australian languages. The question of mood marking in complex sentences is theoretically significant because it involves a clause-internal category that plays a crucial role in the semantics of a construction above the level of the individual clause. Previous work on mood in complex sentences has shown that presence of mood marking in one of the component clauses tends to correlate with a feature of non-actualization on the level of the complex sentence. In this paper, I argue that this semantic generalization actually obscures a number of constructionally relevant distinctions, because there are two additional factors that determine the precise role of the mood marker in the complex sentence: (1) the presence or absence of specifically relational markers like conjunctions and (2) the semantically schematic or specific nature of these markers. In constructions without relational markers, mood markers do not strictly speaking encode the complex sentence relation, but pragmatically trigger it. In constructions with relational markers, on the other hand, mood markers and relational markers jointly encode the complex sentence relation, but their relative contribution depends on a principle of functional trade-off.

Jaar van publicatie:2014