Deontic modality

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Deontic modality (abbreviated DEO) is a linguistic modality that indicates how the world ought to be [1] according to certain norms, expectations, speaker desires, etc. In other words, a deontic expression indicates that the state of the world (where 'world' is loosely defined here in terms of the surrounding circumstances) does not meet some standard or ideal, whether that standard be social (such as laws), personal (desires), etc. The sentence containing the deontic modal generally indicates some action that would change the world so that it becomes closer to the standard or ideal.

Contents

This category includes the following subcategories: [2]

A related type of modality is dynamic modality, which indicates a subject's internal capabilities or willingness as opposed to external factors such as permission or orders given. [4]

Realisation in speech

Deontic moods are a category of grammatical moods that are used to express deontic modality. An example for a deontic mood is the imperative ("Come!").

However, many languages (like English) have additional ways to express deontic modality, like modal verbs ("I shall help you.") and other verbs ("I hope to come soon."), as well as adverbials (hopefully) and other constructions.

Constructed languages

Esperanto

Esperanto has a mood formally called "volitive" which is also used for various directive uses, so it can be seen as a broader deontic mood. However, it is not used to express commissive modality. It is formed by adding -u to the verb stem, and it is used for orders and commands as well as for expressing will, desire, and purpose. [5]

  • Estu feliĉa! "(May you) Be happy!"
  • Donu al mi panon. "Give me bread."
  • Ni iru! "Let's go!"
  • Mi legu tion. "Let me read that."
  • Mi volas, ke vi helpu min. "I want you to help me."
  • Ĉu mi faru tion? "Shall I do that?"

See also

Related Research Articles

Esperanto is the most widely used constructed language intended for international communication; it was designed with highly regular grammatical rules, and as such is considered an easy language to learn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English modal auxiliary verbs</span> Class of auxiliary verbs in English that lack untensed forms

The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.

A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a likelihood, ability, permission, request, capacity, suggestion, order, obligation, necessity, possibility or advice. Modal verbs generally accompany the base (infinitive) form of another verb having semantic content. In English, the modal verbs commonly used are can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and ought.

Deliberative mood is a grammatical mood that asks whether the speaker should do something, e. g. "Shall I go to the market?"

The jussive is a grammatical mood of verbs for issuing orders, commanding, or exhorting. English verbs are not marked for this mood. The mood is similar to the cohortative mood, which typically applies to the first person by appeal to the object's duties and obligations, and the imperative, which applies to the second person. The jussive however typically covers the first and third persons. It can also apply to orders by their author's wish in the mandative subjunctive, as in the English, "The bank insists that she repay her debt."

The permissive mood is a grammatical mood that indicates that the action is permitted by the speaker.

Volitive modality is a linguistic modality that indicates the desires, wishes or fears of the speaker. It is classified as a subcategory of deontic modality.

Some languages distinguish between the optative mood and an imprecative mood. In these languages, the imprecative mood is used to wish misfortune upon others, whereas the optative mood is used for wishes in general. In such a language, "May he lose the race" is in imprecative mood, whereas "May I win the race" would be in optative mood. A commonly given example of a language with an imprecative mood is Turkish, which uses an otherwise obsolete future-tense suffix -esi solely in the third person for curses:

The assumptive mood is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages, which indicates that the statement is assumed to be true, because it usually is under similar circumstances, although there may not be any specific evidence that it is true in this particular case. An English example, would be, "That must be my mother. " Another example in English, using a different modal verb, would be, "He should be a good worker. "

The deductive mood is an epistemic grammatical mood that indicates that the truth of the statement was deduced from other information, rather than being directly known. In English, deductive mood is often indicated by the word must, which is also used for many other purposes. By contrast, some other languages have special words or verb affixes to indicate deductive mood specifically.

Dubitative mood is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages, that indicates that the statement is dubious, doubtful, or uncertain. It may subsist as a separate morphological category, as in Bulgarian, or else as a category of use of another form, as of the conditional mood of Italian or French:

Hypothetical mood is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages which indicates that while a statement is not actually true, it could easily have been. For instance, in English, "You know you shouldn't play with knives! You could have hurt someone!" conveys a meaning that would be expressed with the hypothetical mood in Lakota.

Speculative mood is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages, which indicates that the utterance is based on speculation of the speaker, and not necessarily known to be the case. For example, "The butler could have been the killer."

In linguistics, irrealis moods are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods. They are used in statements without truth value

Inchoative aspect, also known as inceptive, is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages or European derived languages with high percentage of Latin-based words like Esperanto. It should not be confused with the prospective, which denotes actions that are about to start. The English language can approximate the inchoative aspect through the verbs "to become" or "to get" combined with an adjective.

Alethic modality is a linguistic modality that indicates modalities of truth, in particular the modalities of logical necessity, contingency, possibility and impossibility.

In linguistics and philosophy, modality refers to the ways language can express various relationships to reality or truth. For instance, a modal expression may convey that something is likely, desirable, or permissible. Quintessential modal expressions include modal auxiliaries such as "could", "should", or "must"; modal adverbs such as "possibly" or "necessarily"; and modal adjectives such as "conceivable" or "probable". However, modal components have been identified in the meanings of countless natural language expressions, including counterfactuals, propositional attitudes, evidentials, habituals, and generics.

In linguistics, a non-finite clause is a dependent or embedded clause that represents a state or event in the same way no matter whether it takes place before, during, or after text production. In this sense, a non-finite dependent clause represents one process as a circumstance for another without specifying the time when it takes place as in the following examples:

Epistemic modality is a sub-type of linguistic modality that encompasses knowledge, belief, or credence in a proposition. Epistemic modality is exemplified by the English modals may, might, must. However, it occurs cross-linguistically, encoded in a wide variety of lexical items and grammatical structures. Epistemic modality has been studied from many perspectives within linguistics and philosophy. It is one of the most studied phenomena in formal semantics.

In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying. The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself.

References

  1. Loos, Eugene E.; Susan Anderson; Dwight H. Day, Jr.; Paul C. Jordan; J. Douglas Wingate. "What is a deontic modality?". Glossary of linguistic terms. SIL International . Retrieved 2009-12-28.
  2. Bhat, D. N. Shankara (1999). The prominence of tense, aspect, and mood. John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN   90-272-3052-8.
  3. Loos, Eugene E.; Susan Anderson; Dwight H. Day, Jr.; Paul C. Jordan; J. Douglas Wingate. "What is a commissive modality?". Glossary of linguistic terms. SIL International. Retrieved 2009-12-28.
  4. Palmer, F.R., Mood and Modality , Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 70 ff.
  5. Fryer, Helen. "Lesson 10". The Esperanto Teacher (10th ed.). Project Gutenberg . Retrieved 2021-05-26.