The history of modality and mood Penultimate version

Johan van der Auwera & Alfonso Zamorano Aguilar

University of Antwerp University of Cordoba

1. Introduction1

Charleston (1941) is a study of the verb in early 18th century English and a survey of the
grammatical description of that period. Its very last sentence, quoted with approval by
Michael (1970: 434), says that “the treatmentof moods by these grammarians of the 17th
and 18th century shows a confusion and hesitancy which is still to be observed to-day
among modern grammarians”. If one extends the perspective to the entire tradition of the
grammarians’ uses of mood concepts, from Antiquity to the modern age, and further
extends it to include modality concepts, the impression is the same. There have been
thousands of grammatical discussions of mood and modality and though some linguists are
self-assured and clear, the field as a whole cannot be said to have come to grips with these
notions. This avowal has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is obvious: it is
sad that after more than 2000 years our discipline has not reached a better understanding of
what is fundamental to mood and modality. On the positive side, one gets the feeling that
the subject matter of mood and modality is a fascinatingly difficult one and also that one
can still learn from past scholarship.
In this chapter we trace the history of mood and modality in some detail. The
overview is restricted to Western linguistics, with its roots in Greek and Latin antiquity (cp.
also Kürschner 1987, Malter 2004, Załęska 2004).2 We deal with both the semantic and the
formal dimensions of these notions, though we focus on the semantics, and we also show
how some of the issues treated in older traditions remain relevant today. Section 3 deals
with mood and section 4 with modality. Section 5 comments on the present-day use of
these notions. But first, we briefly deal with the etymology of the terms ‘mood’ and
‘modality’. It is interesting that this chapter, different from all the other ones, is more about
mood than about modality. For most of the period treated here, mood is indeed the
prominent notion.

2. Terminology and etymology

The English word ‘mood’ has an interesting etymology. There is the Germanic sense of
‘frame of mind, disposition’, as in to be in a good mood. Next to ‘mood’ there is also a
Latin and French based word ‘mode’. The ‘mode’ sense can be paraphrased as ‘manner’.
The origin is Latin modus ‘measure, manner’, and it entered English in late Middle
English, either directly or via French mode. It is the English ‘mode’ word that most directly
relates to grammar, as the relevant grammatical distinction typically concerns ‘manners’ or
forms of the verb. Yet ‘mood’ came to be associated with grammar too. Using ‘mood’ for
grammatical ‘mode’, the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) notes, was ‘perhaps
reinforced by association’ with the Germanic ‘mental state’ sense, since some central
modes of the verb are the indicative, the imperative, and the optative and these have long

been related to mental states such knowing, wanting and wishing (see below). That is one
reason why ‘mood’ acquired a linguistic sense. Another reason is simply that the Middle
English spelling moode can be seen as the ancestor of both modern ‘mood’ and ‘mode’.
Thus the oldest attestation in the OED for the linguistic sense of both ‘mood’ and ‘mode’ is
the same: “A verbe [...] is declined wyth moode and tyme wyth oute case” (OED, lemma
mood & lemma mode)”. Having two terms for one phenomenon, one Germanic and the
other Romance, is typical for English.3 In current French there is now just mode, though
earlier there was also moeuf, also deriving from modus. Modo, again deriving from Latin
modus, is used in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. Germanic languages such as German,
Norwegian, and Swedish use the Latin word modus and if there is a second term, it tends to
be a word that means ‘manner’ (Dutch, e.g., prefers wijs/wijze, a general ‘manner’ word).
In the Middle Ages scholars used modus in more than one sense, and one of them
was the sense that we now associate with ‘modality’. Since Greek Antiquity there was a
strong philosophical, logical and also theological interest in the concepts of necessity and
possibility, and at least since the 11th century characterizing a proposition as either
necessary or possible was said to characterize its modus.
The modern term ‘modality’ derives from the postclassical Latin word modalitas.
This Latin term was very rare. In the Library of Latin Texts – A (a 63 million words corpus
of 3200 Latin texts from antiquity to the 20th century) the nominative singular modalitas
has only six attestations, all in texts of the 13th century Catalan philosopher Raimundus
Lullus. The term modality entered English from French modalité. In the earliest citation in
the OED (dating 1545) it has the general meaning ‘those aspects of a thing which relate to
its mode’. Its current linguistic use is recent; the earliest attestation is from 1907. But the
linguistic sense immediately relates to logical and philosophical uses, which concern the
qualification of a proposition as necessary or possible. For these senses the earliest OED
entry dates from 1628.
Interestingly, whereas in Germanic and Romance the term ‘modality’ is l clearly
related to the term ‘mood’, in some languages the equivalents of these two terms are
unrelated, with the ‘mood’ term being the oldest one. Thus Russian and Greek have,
respectively, naklonenie and enklisi (lit. ‘inclination’, see below) for ‘mood’, but, for
modality modal’nost’and tropikotita (lit. ‘tropicality’, based on trópos, which was the
classical Greek source for one of the Latin modus senses – see below).

3. Mood and mode

3.1. Quintilian’s modus

The first occurrence of a ‘mood/mode’ etymon in the linguistic sense is commonly traced
back (e.g Wackernagel 1926: 210) to the first century AD and the first of the 12 books of
the Institutio oratoria ‘Institute of oratory’, written by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. In
the relevant passage Quintilian discusses grammatical mistakes and he notes that speakers
are particularly prone to make errors with respect to verbal categories. One of these
categories is the modus.

About substitution, that is when one word is used instead of another, there is no
dispute. It is an error which we may detect in connexion with all the parts of speech,

but most frequently in the verb, because it has greater variety than any other:
consequently in connexion with the verb we get solecisms of gender, tense, person
and mood [modos] (or ‘states’ [status] or ‘qualities’ [qualitates] if you prefer either
of these terms), be these types of error six in number, as some assert, or eight as is
insisted by others (for the number of the forms of solecism will depend on the
number of subdivisions which you assign to the parts of speech of which we have
just spoken). (Quintilian, website addressed November 14, 2011, Latin terms added
from original)

Interestingly, Quintilian does not tell us here – or anywhere else in his Institutio oratoria –
what a mood is. He does supply two synonyms for modus, viz. status and qualitas, both of
which did not have the same lasting success as modus, and he also makes clear that there is
a controversy about how many moods there are: some would accept six and others eight.
As in grammar in general, Latin grammars are based on Greek grammars. And so
modus¸ status and qualitas are translations of Greek. This takes us to Alexandria’s second
century BC, its grammarian Dionysius Thrax, and to the Greek word for mood, viz.
enklísis.

3.2. The Greek grammarians Dionysius Thrax, Protagoras, and Apollonius Dyscolus

Dionysius Thrax is credited with having written the first grammar in the modern sense that
survives to this day, the Techné grammatiké ‘Art of grammar’. It is a grammar of Greek.
Chapter 13 is about the morphology of the verb and it says that

The verb has eight types of attributes: mood [enklísis], state, species, shape,
number, person, tense, and conjugation.
There are five moods – defining [oristiké], imperative [prostaktiké], optative
[euktiké], subjunctive [upotaktiké], and infinitive [aparénfatos]. (Kemp 1986: 354,
Greek terms added from original, website addressed November 8, 2011)

Here too there is no definition of mood, but there is at least a classification, and the number
of moods is not the six or eight alluded to by Quintilian, but five.
For some specialists (see below) the Dionysian listing is the oldest extant listing of
moods in the Western tradition. But others go back further, be it in an indirect way. In the
third century BC Diogenes Laertius writes Bioi kai gnōmai tōn en philosofia
eudokimēsantōn ‘Lives and opinions of eminent philosophers’. In book 9, 54, he writes
about the fifth century BC Presocratic philosopher Protagoras that

[h]e was the first to mark off the parts of discourse into four, namely wish, question,
answer, command. Others divide into seven parts, narration, question, answer,
command, rehearsal, wish, summoning: these he called the basic forms of speech.
(Hicks 1950: II, 467).

In a footnote the translator Hicks claims that these four notions correspond roughly to the
optative, the indicative and the imperative(with the indicative corresponding to two of the

Greek terms), and Allan (2001: 343) equates them with optative-subjunctive, interrogative,
indicative and imperative.
If one compares the classifications by Dionysius Thrax and Protagoras one notices
an overlap.

Table 1: Protagoras and Dionysius Thrax on mood

Protagoras Dionysius Thrax

Hicks (1950) Allan (2001) Kemp (1986)
erōtēsis interrogative
indicative
apokrisis indicative defining oristiké
optative euktiké
euchōlē optative optative-subjunctive
subjunctive upotaktiké
entolē imperative imperative imperative prostaktiké
infinitive aparénfatos

But the overlap is by no means complete. None of the Greek terms are the same, and in the
English translations only the imperative is exactly parallel.
Whether or not Protagoras and Dionysius Thrax are discussing the same thing is a
matter of debate. The translator of Diogenes LaertiusHicks, for instance, as well as the
philosopher Allan and the linguistic historiographer Schmitter (2000: 358), would give
positive answers. But Robins (1997), also a linguistic historiographer, would disagree. He
mentions both classifications and whereas he considers Dionysius Thrax to have
contributed to our understanding of mood (Robins 1997: 44-45), when he discusses
Protagoras, he avoids the term ‘mood’: “Protagoras [...] sets out the different types of
sentence in which a general semantic function was associated with a certain grammatical
structure, e.g. wish, question, statement, and command” (Robins 1997: 32). For the French
specialist Lallot (1989: 162), Protagoras does not deal with mode verbal either, but with
sentence types, a phenomenon also referred with modalité d’énonciation. The fact that
Dionysius uses the term enklísis also suggests that it is something other than Protagoras’
‘part of discourse’, for enklísis is essentially a term in the domain of morphology. It means
‘flection’ or ‘derivation’ and refers to a formation that is different from the basic form of a
category, as Lallot (1989: 162) makes clear, and he further points out that some early
Greek grammarians consider moods as counterparts to what cases are for nouns. For the
philosopher Nuchelmans (1973: 30), too, Protagoras is not dealing with moods but with the
fundamental ‘kinds of speech’, which are to become an issue in a tradition of rhetoric,
developed by Aristotle and his Peripatetic followers and by Stoic philosophers and
rhetoricians. But then, paradoxically, Quintilian, who is responsible for the term modus, is
a rhetorician, too: rhetoricians are supposed to be dealing with kinds of speech, but for
mood he does not focus on speech. Probably, as Nuchelmans (1973: 102) and earlier also
Koppin (1877: 11) conclude, the classification of mood was ‘at least partially inspired’ by
the classification of kinds of speech (see also Schmitter 2000: 358-359). Interestingly, this
relation and tension is present in later accounts too (see Kahn 2004: 250-251 for the
thirteenth century). And even today: it is perhaps no coincidence that when König &
Siemund (2007: 280-281) discuss the typology of basic sentence types they draw attention
to the ambivalent character of the imperative:

Another common difficulty with the view of a paradigmatic opposition between the
three basic sentence types under discussion [declarative, interrogative, imperative]
is the fact that the imperative is often expressed by a specific inflectional form even
in languages which do not distinguish the two other types by morphological means.
In such languages the imperative is often analysed as being one option in a system /
of ‘mood’, which also includes the categories ‘indicative’, ‘subjunctive’,
‘conditional’, ‘optative’ and perhaps others [...]’. (König & Siemund 2007: 280-
281)

It is also the imperative that was common to both Protagoras’ and Dionysius’
classifications.
Note also that as a description of basic sentence types the Protagorean description is
fairly good. It is very close to modern classifications (such as König & Siemund 2007).
The Dionysian classification is more problematic, however, the main problem being the
inclusion of the infinitive, which is nowadays no longer considered to be a category of
mood. It is of course true that the infinitive is a form of the verb, in other words, a manner
or mode of the verb. Dionysius did not tell us whether this mode was to be associated with
any semantics. So perhaps mode/mood functioned as a wastebasket category and to the
extent that the infinitive does not concern more specific categories such as person or tense,
for instance, it was possible to accommodate it within a vague category of mood.
For a first account of what the mood categories have in common meaningwise,
studies of the history of linguistics take us three to four centuries further (second century
AD), still in Alexandria, to another founding father of Western linguistics, viz. Apollonius
Dyscolus and his Peri syntaxeōs ‘About the construction’ (Lallot 1997). In this elaborate
treatise Apollonius appears to treat enklísis as diathesis tes psukhes ‘diathesis/disposition of
the mind’ or ‘mental disposition’ (book I § 51, book III § 55, 59). What exactly this means
is not clear (cp. Mazhuga 2014). For Lallot (1997: II, 37) enklísis is to be understood as
‘modality’, but this is not too helpful, for what exactly is meant by modality here? What
does seem clear is that the meaning or use of enklísis is related to the mental state of a
person, who is, at least typically, the speaker. Lallot (1989: 162, 1997: vol 2, 186) calls this
the ‘psychological’ interpretation of the term enklísis and he quotes the Byzantine
commentator Choeroboscos (who worked between the sixth and tenth century), who makes
the psychological interpretation explicit: “enklísis, that is the preference of the mind, that is
to say that to which the mind inclines, in other terms, that to which it leans” (Lallot 1997:
vol 2, 186-187; translation ours). This interpretation, sometimes also expressed in terms of
‘acts’ (Lallot 1997: vol 1, 23), takes the mood idea back to Protagoras. But the connection
with form is present as well: according to the specialists enklísis still also refers to the
“configuration of sound which conventionally expresses such an inclination or attitude”
(Nuchelmans 1973: 101; see also Lallot 1997: vol 2, 186).
Apollonius accepts the five Dionysian moods and also the terminology, and for
some of the moods he makes clear what the mind is disposed to: with the indicative
(oristiké or apofantikē) one indicates, with the optative (eutike) one expresses a wish and
with the imperative (oristiké) one orders (Lallot 1997: vol 1, 23). These are indeed the
three moods for which it is relatively easy to characterize the disposition of the mind. The
infinitive and the subjunctive are more problematic, both from a semantic and a formal

point of view. The infinitive is considered neutral or unmarked both with respect to
expressing any particular disposition of the mind and having formal marking. Dionysius
therefore treats it as the most general, basic mood, as its Greek name makes clear
(aparemphaton ‘which expresses nothing more’), much like the nominative would be the
basic case (Lallot 1989: 163). The problems with the subjunctive are different and they are
again both semantic and formal. As to the semantics, according to Apollonius the
subjunctive expresses doubt (Lallot 1997: vol 1: 247), but this is not always the case, for
Greek uses the subjunctive for a first person plural exhortative. As to the form, different
from the other moods, the subjunctive is claimed to need the subordinating conjunction ean
‘if’, a property which the very term ‘subjunctive’ or, clearer perhaps, ‘subordinative’ refers
to. This is strange for two reasons. First, mood is no longer only defined in terms of the
form of the verb only. Second, the exhortative use just referred to does not involve the
conjunction ean, or any other conjunction, for that matter. Interestingly, Dionysius does
provide an analysis of the first person exhortative uses of the subjunctive. It is called a
‘suggestive’ use, and the latter is treated as a suppletive form of the imperative (Lallot
1990, 1997: II 220) and we thus see Dionysius dealing with an issue that is still
controversial today (cp. van der Auwera et al. 2004). The very issue of whether mood
should be defined formally only in terms of verbal morphology is a modern one too. In a
recent survey of mood in the languages of Europe (Rothstein & Thieroff eds. 2010) the
introductory chapter defines mood as a morphological category of the verb (Thieroff 2010:
3), but the author admits that “certain particles [...] may contribute to a (morphological)
mood category” (Thieroff 2010: 3) and he cannot prevent the authors of the Danish chapter
(Christensen & Heltoft 2010: 98) from claiming that in this language word order
distinctions have replaced verbal morphology and “ are best analyzed as mood systems
themselves”’ (see also Van Olmen 2012).

3.3. Greek categories applied to Latin: Priscian

So much for the earliest work on mood, all of which concerns Greek. In the history of
Western linguistics this Greek tradition was applied to Latin. This creates a specific
problem for the analysis of mood, viz. one concerning the optative. We will illustrate this
with one of the most influential Roman grammarians, Priscian, who worked in
Constantinople in the sixth century and whose most important work is Institutiones
grammaticae ‘Grammatical foundations’ (see Baratin et al eds. 2009). For Priscian, the
semantic view of moods is that of Appolonius: moods are the diversae inclinationes animi,
varios eios affectus demonstrantes ‘the different inclinations of the mind, demonstrating its
various affections’ (Calboli 2009: 317)), a definition referring to both meaning and form.
And like Appolonius and Dionysius before him, he accepts five moods, viz, the indicative
(indicativus, also called definitivus), the imperative (imperativus), the optative (optativus),
the subjunctive (subjunctivus), and the infinitive (infinitivus). The problem of the infinitive
and the subjunctive is the same as for Appolonius, but now there is also the problem of the
optative. While in Greek the optative is a distinctive verbal paradigm, in Latin it is at best
just a use of the subjunctive. One could reproach Priscian for having pushed Latin into the
mould of Greek (Robins 1997: 73) and for having laid the foundations for a 'pedagogical
disaster' (Hudson 2014: 240), yet if pride of place is to go to meaning, then attributing a
separate mood to the expression of wish is defendable. Furthermore, as mentioned before,

the psychological perspective easily takes us back to the Protagorean kinds of speech, and
why shouldn’t the expression of wish be allowed as a ‘kind of speech’? But then, why
should one stop at five moods?
Indeed, various ancient grammarians did not stop at five, though not always for
semantic reasons. Sometimes an impersonal mood is allowed (Michael 1970: 115) and
Nuchelmans (1973: 129) mentions the fourth century Marius Victorinus, who accepts ten
moods: indicative, imperative, promissive, optative, conjunctive, concessive, infinitive,
impersonal, gerund and hortatory. Nuchelmans (1973: 130) further points out that the
interrogative was occasionally included, and also the participle, and sometimes a
distinction was made between what were called the ‘conjunctive’ and the ‘subjunctive’.

3.4. The Middle Ages and the appearance of different notions of ‘mood’

Throughout the middle ages European scholars write grammars of Latin and Greek and
from the twelfth century on, when the work of Aristotle becomes better known and
universities develop, a lot of attention goes to what could be called the ‘philosophy of
grammar’, a general account of how language relates to mind and reality. This theory is
called ‘Speculative Grammar’, a combination of Greek and Latin grammar and the
Catholic interpretation of Aristotle called ‘Scholasticism’. With respect to modus as used
for ‘imperative mood’ and the like, there is little originality: the medieval scholars
essentially follow the classical authors, esp. Priscian and Donatus. However, interestingly,
in Speculative Grammar the term modus appears with a new sense, best translated with the
English word ‘mode’. The properties of things are their ‘modes’; there are modes of their
existence, of the mind understanding them, and of the language signifying them. The
notion of mode is so important that Speculative Grammarians are also known as modistae
or ‘modists’.
In that period, there are three more uses of the term modus, all found in the field of
logic. First, in the study of syllogisms, one sense of modus refers to the characterization of
the premises and the conclusion as universal or particular and as positive or negative. (1) is
such a syllogism, i.e. a valid modus or way of reasoning, with in this case, positive
universal quantifiers

(1) All animals are mortal.

All cats are animals.
Therefore all cats are mortal.

Second, in propositional logic, modus also refers to the structure of argumentation, as in

calling the argument in (2) a modus (ponendo) ponens argument.

(2) If it is raining, then the streets get wet.

It is raining.
Therefore the streets get wet.

Third, the term modus more or less refers to what we would now call ‘modality’ and what
translates the Greek trópos. The term was used this way in commentaries on Aristotle
(Prantl 1855: 654) and it is already attested in Boethius (sixth century; Prantl 1855: 695). A

proposition has a propositional content (dictum) as e.g. that it is raining and of this dictum
one can say that it is necessary, possible, impossible or contingent. These characterizations
– and sometimes also the ones with the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ – are called modi and
when there is such a modus, then the whole proposition is modalis (Bocheński 1961: 182;
Spruyt 1994).
This multifunctionality of uses of the term modus is not too surprising, for modus
basically just means ‘manner’. But the multifunctionality is also confusing or, if one takes a
positive view, thought provoking. In what follows we will see that scholars will confuse or
attempt to integrate – depending on one’s point of view – modus as in the modus of the
imperative and modus as in the characterization of a proposition as necessary.

3.5. Mood concepts for and in vernaculars

When humanist scholars turn their attention to the vernacular languages, the antique
authors remain important, in part because the humanists usually still also work on Latin
and Greek. A good illustration is the Spanish grammarian Elio Antonio de Nebrija
Zamorano Aguilar 2001). He is the author of the first Spanish grammar, the Gramática de
la lengua castellana ‘Grammar of the Castilian language’ (1492), but this work was
preceded by a grammar of Latin (Introductiones Latinae ‘Latin introductions’, 1481). In
both grammars, the discussion of mood is based on Priscian. Thus the general notion of
mood is defined as a category of the verb, with reference to demonstrating, ordering and
wishing. And the listing, also the one for Spanish, has the five most commonly
distinguished moods, i.e., indicative, imperative, optative, subjunctive and infinitive. The
old problems of the infinitive and that of distinguishing the subjunctive and the optative
remain. And sometimes, even when the grammarian only uses the classical five moods,
new problems appear.
Thus the first grammarians of German that write in German accept the five moods,
including a subjunctive, but the forms listed are actually German indicatives, not
Konjunktiv forms (Jellinek 1914: 313). The reason is, as Jellinek points out, that the
subjunctive is defined as whatever verb form follows the equivalent of the Latin
conjunction cum ‘when’. In German they take wann to be the equivalent of cum but wann
is followed by an indicative. Sixteenth century grammarians of French using the five
classical moods have a similar problem, this time with the conditionnel. It relates to what is
not real, a bit like the subjunctive, but the subjunctive-like mode at their disposal is the
optative, and that notion does not help much to characterize the conditionnel (Donzé 1967:
113).
As in the classical sources, there are grammarians that distinguish more than 5
moods. In England, for example, the Latinists Thomas Linacre and John Colet add a non-
classical mood, the potential mood, an addition that will be followed by later grammarians,
both of Latin and of English (see Michael 1970: 424; Vorlat 1975: 329; Padley 1976: 49).
An interesting genre is the grammar of Latin or Greek written in the vernacular. Its
interest is due to the fact that grammarians often take an implicit or explicit contrastive
perspective, trying to provide equivalents in the vernacular. In that context, more
particularly in the famous English grammar of Latin known as 'Lily's Grammar' (Gwosdek
(ed.) 2013) a notion of ‘sign’ appears (Gwosdek 2013: 170). A sign of a mood is a formal
marking of the mood other than the morphology of the verb. Of course, accepting markers

other than verbal morphology is classical practice. For Greek the conjunctive needed the
marker ean ‘if’, the Latin conjunctive and optative were often defined with respect to the
conjunction cum ‘when’ and utinam ‘if only’, respectively, but we now see the appearance
of other such signs. Thus to is considered the sign of the English infinitive, for the optative
we have the signs would God, I pray God and God graunt, and for the newly added
potential Lily’s grammar mentions the signs can, could, might, should and ought, i.e. verbs
or auxiliaries which we would now call ‘modal’ (Blach ed. 1909: 87; Vorlat 1975: 330).
We find them also in the Latin grammar De institutione grammatica libri tres ‘About the
grammatical foundation three books’ (1572), written by the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel
Álvares (see Schäfer 1993)). This grammar also accepts a potential mood, probably due to
Linacre (Schäfer 1993: 291). Though the Alvares grammar is written in Latin, the author
uses paraphrases in Portuguese, and for the potential he glosses them with the verbs dever
‘must’ and poder ‘may, can’. We find the modal verbs in the grammars of the vernaculars,
too. In the wake of the Lily grammar of Latin, William Turner (1668-1726) writes a
grammar of English (A short grammar for the English tongue, 1710) (see Vorlat 1975:
336), in which he accepts the potential and says that “[t]he Potential Mood signifieth a
power, duty or desire, and hath one of those signs, may, can, might, whould, should, could
or ought” (Vorlat 1975: 336). In the wake of the Latin grammar of Latin by Alvares, Bento
Pereirawrites a Latin grammar of Portuguese (Ars grammatica pro lingua Lusitania
addiscenda ‘The art of grammar for the learning of the Lusitanian language’, 1672; see
Schäfer 1993) and for the potential he says that it is expressed by the verb poder (Schäfer
1993: 301).
The acceptance of a potential mood and of verbs as signs of this mood is an
indication that the Priscian tradition is gradually losing importance. In a survey of 223
grammars of English that are published between 1586 and 1801 and that discuss mood,
Michael (1970: 434) distinguishes between no fewer than 23 different types of accounts
and 19 of the grammars deny English to have any moods at all. Thus 1710 has a
grammarian called James Greenwood declaring that “[i]n English there are no Moods,
because the Verb has no Diversity of Endings” (Michael 1970: 426). Interestingly, the
reluctance to honor the small degree of morphological diversity of English with a mood
system is connected, by a certain James Pickbourn, to the richness of its auxiliaries, so that
the acceptance of no moods comes very close to the acceptance of an abundance of moods:
“The English language may be said [...] to have as many modes as it has auxiliary verbs:
for the compound expressions which they help to form, point out those modifications and
circumstances of actions which in other languages are conveyed by modes” (Michael 1970:
427).
The mood descriptions of Latin and Greek also have to allow unorthodox
treatments. Even Latin with its verbal morphology is declared to have no moods, as in the
Scholae in liberales artes ‘Schools in the liberal arts’ (1559) by the French grammarian
Petrus Ramus or Pierre de la Ramée (Vorlat 1975: 330-332; Padley 1976:89-90). The
reason is that the Priscian inclination of the mind is claimed to be a matter of the sentence
as a whole – a return, it would seem, to the sentential perspective of Protagoras, except that
this perspective is not allowed to avail itself of the term modus. Nor are the Latin verbal
distinctions that are traditionally called ‘imperative’, ‘conjunctive’ and ‘indicative’: Ramus
forces them into his tense category. A modern view is presented by Gerard Johannes
Vossius in his De arte grammatica ‘About the art of grammar’ (1635); Latin would only

 10

have an imperative, a subjunctive and an indicative. The optative is banned because it

cannot be defined in terms of verbal morphology, and the infinitive is not really a mood
either, or at best only in a ‘secondary sense’, for it accepts the mood of its ‘verb
accompaniment’ – a view he took from the earlier Julius Caesar Scaliger (Padley 1976: 69,
128).

3.6. Universal grammar

In 1660 Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot publish, so it is assumed, the Grammaire
générale et raisonnée, often referred to as the ‘Port-Royal’ grammar, named after schools
with the same name (see Arnauld & Lancelot 1969). Arnauld and Lancelot attempt to
describe what is universal to human language and how this universality derives from the
nature of the human mind. This is a new genre, but it is based on the grammars that the
authors know best, i.e. those of Latin and Greek and of the Western European vernaculars,
esp., in the case of the Port Royal grammar, French. Not surprisingly, therefore, the theory
of mood is very much in line with the language-specific grammars and the classifications
that come down from antiquity. It so happens that the Port-Royal grammar dismisses the
infinitive, but the acceptance of the infinitive as a separate mode had been discussed in the
language-specific grammars as well (see also Leclerc 2002). An interesting universal
grammar, one among many, is the Hermes (1751) by James Harris (see Harris 1993). It
illustrates a theory of mood that is more in line with the Protagorean approach in that the
interrogative is included as a mood (Harris 1993: 143). Harris is furthermore special in
associating moods with text types (Haßler & Neis 2009: 1254). The indicative would be the
mode of science, for instance, and his ‘requisitive’ (essentially the imperative) would be
the mode of legislature.
The interest in universal grammar also leads grammarians to devise universal
languages. One of these grammarians is bishop John Wilkins, the author of An essay
towards a real character and a philosophical language (Wilkins 1668). Like the
descriptive Port Royal grammarians these grammarians start from the languages they
know. Thus Wilkins’ system is essentially based on the grammar of Latin (Padley 1976:
208), but interestingly, as a speaker of a language with little verbal morphology and a
perspicuous system of modal verbs, his mood theory owes more to English than to Latin.
Moods are said to be either primary or secondary.

The Primary Modes are called by Grammarians, Indicative and Imperative. [...] /
The Secondary Modes [...] make the Sentence to be (as Logicians call it) a Modal
Proposition.
This happens when the Matter in discourse namely, the being, doing or suffering of
a thing, is considered not simply by it self, but gradually in its causes from which it
proceeds either Contingently or Necessarily.
Then a thing seems to be left as Contingent, when the speaker expresses only the
Possibility of it, or his Liberty of it.
1. The Possibility of a thing, depends on the power of its cause, and be expressed
when Absolute by the Particle CAN,
Conditional COULD.

 11

2. The Liberty of a thing, depends upon a freedom from all Obstacles either within
or without, and is usually expressed in our Language, when Absolute by the
Conditional
Particle MAY
MIGHT
Then a thing seems to be of Necessity, when the speaker expresseth the resolution
of his own will, or some other obligation from without.
3. The Inclination of the will is expressed, if Absolute by the Particles WILL
Conditional WOULD.
4. The Necessity of a thing, from some external obligation, whether Natural or Moral
which we call duty, is expressed, if Absolute by the particle MUST, ought, shall,
Conditional MUST, ought, should.
(Wilkins 1668: 315, see also Vorlat 1975: 332-333)

The passage is quoted at length for several reasons. First, it illustrates the continuing
attractiveness of including the analysis of modal verbs under the heading of ‘mood’, which
goes back at least a century, with Lily’s grammar allowing modal verbs to be ‘signs’ of
mood. This will remain a feature of English grammar writing until well into the 20th
century, with e.g. Sweet’s [A] New English grammar (1891: 420-482) considering the
modal auxiliaries as ‘periphrastic moods’ or Zandvoort’s [A] Handbook of English
grammar (1950: 102-105) calling auxiliaries ‘modal’ if their meaning comes close to that
treated under ‘verbal mood’. Second, what is also interesting in Wilkins (1668) is that the
modal verbs are not merely listed as additional means of expressing mood, but are
considered potentially equivalent to the mood of verbal inflection: “As for that other use of
the Imperative Mode, when it signifies Permission; this may be sufficiently expressed by
the Secondary Mode of Liberty. You may do it.” (Wilkins 1668: 316, see also Vorlat 1975:
332). Third, the account of the modal verbs is explicitly linked up with the logicians’ ideas
of necessity and possibility, i.e., the logician’s sense of modus, the modern sense of
modality. In the twentieth century we will see the linguist Palmer (1986, 2001) doing the
same thing (see below). Fourth, it offers a fairly modern sketch of the meanings of the
English modal verbs. And fifth, it can be noted that Wilkins only uses ‘mode’, not ‘mood’.
The two terms remain in use until today, with ‘mood’ now taking the upper hand. But this
is recent. Bloomfield (1933) and Hockett (1958), for instance, only use ‘mode’, not
‘mood’.

3.7. Kant

Whereas Wilkins implicitly has modality under the rubric of mood, the opposite ordering
will also be found, in part as a result of the increasing importance of the notion of
‘modality’ within logic and philosophy. This is largely due to Immanuel Kant and his
Kritik der reinen Vernuft ‘Critique of pure reason’ (1781; Kant 1934). Here Kant uses the
term Modalität for the modus sense that refers to the necessity and possibility of
propositions (Pape 1966: 14-15), i.e. to the Boethian sense. The way he is doing this is
considered to be philosophically innovative, even ‘Copernican’ (Poser 1981: 195). What
matters for us is that Kant considers modality to be one of the four classes of categories of

 12

human judgment, next to quantity, quality and relation, each comprising three categories.4
In the case of modality they are the problematical, the assertorical and the apodeictical:

Problematical judgments are those in which the affirmation or negation is accepted

as merely possible (ad libitum). In the assertorical, we regard the proposition as real
(true): in the apodeictical, we look on it as necessary. (Kant 1934: 76)

Some grammarians took the three-division of modality to be the basis for understanding
Dionysian mood. Thus, starting from the thesis that the laws of language correspond to
those of thought, J.G. Hasse appears to have claimed in 1792 (Versuch einer griechischen
und lateinischen Grammatologie ‘Attempt at a Greek and Latin grammar’) that the three
types of modality are reflected in the three moods: reality is expressed by the indicative,
possibility by the conjunctive, and necessity by the imperative (Koppin 1877: 14; Hale
1906: 194). The general idea of explaining mood in terms of modality had various
supporters and versions, and was applied to both classical languages and German (see
Naumann 1986: 307-311) and probably other languages.
At the very beginning of the twentieth century the modality-based approach to
mood is strongly condemned by the classical scholar William Gardner Hale (1906; see also
Kluyver 1911). He characterizes the entire nineteenth century scholarship of mood as one
of unscientific ‘metaphysical syntax’, a view quoted with approval by Jespersen (1924:
319). In his own work (esp. Jespersen 1909-1949), Jespersen essentially treats mood as a
morphological category of the verb, with meanings that are not defined in terms of
modality and with no desire to include the modality of what we call ‘modal auxiliaries’. He
does, of course, discuss English verbs such as must and may. First, they are treated in the
chapter on tense (vol. 4, 5-16), because some of the modal auxiliaries are old preterit
presents, i.e., verbs with preterit morphology but with present meaning. And second, they
are also discussed in the sections on verb complementation, more particularly, the ones
dealing with the infinitival objects (vol. 5, 170-185). In Jespersen (1924), the theoretical
underpinning of the grammar, the situation is similar: there is no place for ‘modality’, only
for ‘mood’, though interestingly, Jespersen does admit to discussing a second notion of
mood, viz., what he (1924: 319-321) calls ‘notional mood’, and he lists no fewer than 20
such notional moods, expressible by “verbal moods and auxiliaries of various languages”.
Here we find he must be rich as an illustration of ‘necessitative’ mood and you may go if
you like as an example of ‘permissive’ mood. So must and may do enter the discussion of
mood, but only through a backdoor, for Jespersen (1924: 320, 321) adds that he “cannot,
however, attach any great importance” to his listing of notional moods, for “[t]here are
many ‘moods’ if one leaves the safe ground of verbal forms actually found in a language”.

3.8. Enters ‘irrealis’

A special development is the appearance of the term ‘irrealis’. In current work it stands in
opposition to ‘realis’, but the term ‘irrealis’ probably arose as a member of a set of three
terms, with ‘potentialis’ as the third term, with particular relevance for the study of
conditional sentences. The term ‘potentialis’ is relatively old: we have seen the sixteenth
century grammarians Linacre, Colet and Alvares (see 3.5) adding a potential mood to the
list of classical moods. The term ‘irrealis’ is a non-classical Latin adjective that is totally

 13

absent from the Library of Latin Texts – A. Possibly through Sapir (1992: 186-187;
originally published in 1930), the term ‘irrealis’ emancipated itself into a general term –
and a noun – for what is not real (Latin realis, medieval Latin, but initially also without the
linguistic sense) – or ‘not factual’ or ‘not veridical’, often also including what is potential.
This usage gained prominence in the last quarter of the twentieth century (cp. the
comments by Bybee et al 1994: 236). Symptomatic of its rise is that Palmer (2001) has a
chapter on ‘Realis and irrealis’, while Palmer (1986) does not. The main attraction, it
seems, is that it allows one to conceive of mood as having just two categories, viz. realis
vs. irrealis, instead of e.g. the five from Antiquity.

3.9. Conclusion

The history of ‘mood’ concepts is confusing. There are at least three important notions.
One is the Protagorean notion: it deals with sentence or speech act types. Related, yet
different, is the Dionysian notion: it typically, but not necessarily deals with an ‘inclination
of the mind’ as it is marked on the verb. A third notion, related but again different, is the
Boethian notion, which refers to the characterization of a proposition in terms of, most
prominently, necessity and possibility. Part of the confusion is also due to the interference
of the term ‘modality’, to which we turn now.

4. Modality

4.1. Modality, but without the term ‘modality’

We have already mentioned that Kant used the dormant term ‘modality’ in an influential
way. However, the conceptual issues of what is arguably the core of modality, viz., the
distinction between necessity and possibility, occupied scholars since Greek antiquity and
they were especially prominent in Aristotle (Seel 1982). A central idea in this tradition, of
interest for linguistics, is the ‘square of oppositions’. In essence it goes back to Aristotle
too (De interpretatione 6-7, 17b 17-26) but Apuleius of Madaura in the second century
before our era might have given its first diagrammatic representation (see Londey &
Johanson 1987). The categorization of the square is held true for various sets of categories.
The most important application is probably quantification, with notions such as ‘all’ and
‘some’, but we will here only deal with modality. Figure 1 shows the classical version of
the ‘modal square’.

 14

Figure 1: The Aristotelian square for modality

The square has a left side, which is positive, and a right one, which is negative. The
positive side has an ‘A’ at the top and an ‘I’ at the bottom, referring to the bold face letters
in the word affirmo (Latin for ‘I affirm’). The right side has an ‘E’ and an ‘O’, referring to
the bold faced letters in nego (Latin for ‘I deny’). The top values imply the ones at the
bottom. Thus if something is necessary, it is also possible. The values that are diagonally
opposed to one another are contradictory: they cannot hold true or false together. Thus a
proposition cannot be both necessary and not necessary and it is impossible for something
to be neither necessary nor not necessary. The relation between A and E is one of
contrariety, which means that an A proposition and an E proposition cannot be true
together. When something is necessary, then it cannot also be the case that it is impossible.
The A and E propositions can both be false though: it is perfectly fine for something to be
neither necessary nor impossible and, in that case, one would say that it is possible. The
relation between I and 0, finally, has been called ‘subcontrariety’. The idea is that I and O
cannot be false together, but that they can be true together. This is not self-evident and it
has caused problems, apparently already for Aristotle (Horn 1990: 454), but the details
need not concern us here.
Issues relating to the Aristotelian square have been discussed by logicians and
philosophers until today, but linguists have also joined the discussion, see e.g. Horn (1999).
This means that the conceptual analysis that is embodied in the square is deemed applicable
to natural language, which is not surprising, for the logicians and philosophers start from
natural language, too, some more explicitly than others – see Uckelman (2008: 390-391)
for some notes on a thirteenth century dispute as to whether modus involves adjectives,
adverbs, or both. But either way, for a linguist, too, necessity will imply possibility.
Nowadays, pride of place goes to verbs as the exponents of modality, and here too, the
linguist will readily agree that there is a sense in which must entails may.
Note that the representation with the square focuses on the interaction of modality
and negation. Figure 1 highlights the effect of external negation, with negation scoping
over modality – with not scoping over necessary in O, and im- scoping over possible in E.
Figure 2 is a version that adds labels highlighting internal negation (necessary not, possible
not).

 15

Figure 2: The Aristotelian square for modality, highlighting internal negation

necessary
impossible 
necessary not 

possible not necessary 
possible not

This kind of interaction has engaged linguists too. Palmer (1979: 7-8), for instance, in the
first of a few ground breaking studies of English modality, analyzes (3) as the expression of
‘possible not’ and (4) of ‘not necessary’ and finds their equivalence to be explained by
logic.

(3) He may not be working in his study.

(4) He need not be working in his study.

Or consider the relation between possible and impossible. They are contradictory. Thus one
would expect that not impossible is the same as possible. Linguists have worked on this
expectation and one might conclude that possible and not impossible are indeed equivalent
on a semantic level, but not on a pragmatic level, see Horn (1991).

4.2 Kant, von Wright, and Palmer

With Kant the term ‘modality’ gains some frequency, and it replaces the Boethian sense of
‘mood’, primarily in philosophy and logic, but also in linguistics, especially but not
exclusively in the German tradition. Thus, since at least the end of the nineteenth century
Dutch grammarians use a notion of modality (modaliteit) in the modern sense (e.g. Kluyver
1911, Van Wijk 1931: 143-155 [originally published in 1906]), and one of them, Den
Hertog (1973: 116 [original from 1892]), explicitly attributes the term to Kant.
Interestingly, there is no clear or strong Kantian effect on English grammar writing: as
already mentioned, Jespersen (1909-1949, 1924) has no need for the term ‘modality’.
In early twentieth century English linguistics the term ‘modality’ is not totally
absent, however. An interesting use is found in Sapir’s (1921). He uses ‘modality’, but only
in the sense of ‘mood’ (Sapir 1921: 87-88, 108). Another example is the grammar by
Zandvoort. It has a section ‘Mood and modality’ (Zandvoort 1950: 102-105). Most of it
concerns mood in the traditional sense (indicative, subjunctive, ...), but he uses ‘modal’
when a preterit or an auxiliary has a meaning that comes close to one treated under ‘mood’.
The adjective ‘modal’ is explicitly related to ‘mode’, which is treated as a synonym of

 16

‘mood’. Lyons’ (1968: 307-309) is written in the same spirit. ‘Mood’ is his general term,
‘modality’ does occur, but seemingly only for stylistic variation (cp. Hermerén 1978: 10).
The Lyons case is interesting. Less than 10 years later, in his other major textbook, Lyons
(1977) spends a chapter on both ‘modality’ and ‘mood’, with 60 pages for modality,
illustrated primarily by modal auxiliaries, beating the 50 pages for mood, primarily dealing
with speech acts. It is in this period that modality becomes important in English linguistics.
Lyons is not the only linguist to effectuate this change. Major players are Leech (1969 and
following), Halliday (1970 and following), Palmer (1979 and following) and Coates
(1983). Each of these authors discusses English auxiliaries such as must and may in terms
of a notion of modality. The contrast with Lebrun (1965) could not be stronger: this is a
semantic corpus-based study of may and can, in which the author relates his results to the
relevant literature, and the book does not contain a single occurrence of the term
‘modality’. An important catalyst of change is Palmer (1979), and, interestingly, here we
again witness linguistics turning to logic and philosophy. This time the source of
inspiration is not Kant, but von Wright (1951), which Palmer (1979: 2) considers a
‘pioneering work on modal logic’. Palmer finds von Wright’s work of high interest, not so
much for the technical details of modal logic, but for the distinctions made between types
of ‘modality’. Von Wright has four types, viz. alethic, epistemic, deontic and existential.
The details do not matter here, but two of the four notions, viz. ‘epistemic modality’ and
‘deontic modality’, are now generally accepted as relevant linguistic categories.
Interestingly also, Von Wright uses the term ‘modality’, but he interchanges it with ‘mode’,
in the Boethian sense of Latin modus. In Palmer, however, only von Wright’s ‘modality’ is
used, for he needs ‘mood’ for something else, viz. the Protagoras-Dionysius sense of
‘mood’.
At the time of the increasing use of the term ‘modality’ in England, Americans
somewhat independently start using the term as well, with e.g. Fillmore (1972: 23)
bipartitioning the sentence into a proposition and modality – in an extremely wide sense
“including such modalities on the sentence-as-a-whole as negation, tense, mood and
aspect” – and with generative grammarians discussing where the locus is of the various
types of modals in successive formal modals of grammar. It so happens that in English the
modal auxiliaries are a particularly thorny subject, both formally – they are special verbs –
and semantically – they are highly polyfunctional. And since Anglocentric linguistics
dominates the world, the term ‘modality’ also heads for global usage. And, of course, in
some cases, the use of ‘modality’ coming from Anglocentric linguistics reinforces the use
in another vernacular, such as German or Dutch. To some extent, this happens for French
too. Brunot (1922) employs a wide sense of modality (modalité), encompassing both mood
(mode) and modal auxiliaries (called auxiliares de modes). But more influential is probably
the bipartition of the clause, a little like that of Fillmore, proposed by Bally (1965: 36-38,
45-46, 216-218), who avails himself of the dictum vs modus terminology, but who also has
a use for modalité and mode, each with a meaning different from modus. The Bally
approach is influential in France and beyond, in Russia (through the work of Vinogradov ;
V. Plungian p.c.) and even as far as Japan (Larm 2006: 66-68). But in current Japan, like
everywhere else, \it is the English language way of doing grammar and adopting
terminology that is exerting its influence. All of these factors conspire to making
‘modality’ a prominent term in today’s grammar and semantics.

 17

5. Mood and modality today, and in this book

What we see in the history of Western linguistics, simplifying somewhat, is the rise of
‘modality’ at the expense of ‘mood’. Right now, in the beginning of the 21st century, the
notion of modality is widely used and in many different ways (see Chapter 1), its
prominence is due to at least Palmer, von Wright and Kant (1781), and it essentially goes
back to and replaces the Boethian notion of ‘mood’. ‘Modality’ also assails the Protagorean
notion of ‘mood’, referring to sentence types and/or speech acts, either to replace it or to
include it as one dimension of modality. The first line of thought, that of replacing
modality replacing Protagorean mood, is typical for nineteenth century Kant inspired
linguistics but it was not taken up. The second line of thought, with modality including
Protagorian mood,,is found in current research (e.g. Portner 2009: 6, 258-263), but it is not
a mainstream idea. However, Protagorean ‘mood’, as an independent notion, is still very
much alive (see e.g. Stenius 1967; Lyons 1968: 308; Lewis 1972; Kürschner 1987), and
this is also the perspective taken in this book.
This book also uses the notion of ‘mood’ in a second way, viz. to refer to these
aspects of meaning that are treated under labels such as ‘subjunctive’, ‘conjunctive’ and
also – as a newcomer – ‘irrealis’. This usage is also in line with a good part of current
practice and it goes back to the Dionysian concept of ‘mood’. But there is a lot of
divergence and confusion here. The meaning associated with a notion such as ‘subjunctive’
is typically registered in the morphology of the verb. As a result many linguists take this
link to be definitional and they consider ‘mood’ as meaning that has to be expressed
through verbal inflection, or as the verbal inflection that expresses this meaning,. In the
latter case ‘mood’ becomes a formal category which relates to ‘modality’ in the way that
‘tense’ relates to ‘time’ (see e.g. Eisenberg 1986: 98; Palmer 1986: 21-23. 33; 2001: 4;
Bybee et al 1994: 181).
This brief overview by no means covers all current uses of the term ‘mood’ and
‘modality’. Bhat (1999), for example, uses ‘mood’ for what most contemporary linguists
call ‘modality’ and, in his approach, a traditional ‘mood’ category of the imperative is not
taken as a category of ‘mood’, but as a ‘speech act’ category. For Hengeveld (2004) mood
is a formal category only (not restricted to morphology) corresponding to the semantic
categories of modality and illocution. Given the confusing history of the last two thousand
years, today’s lack of terminological agreement is not surprising and, sadly, the relief of
‘mood’ in some of its uses by ‘modality’ did not bring about the desirable terminological
clarity. This implies that no modern user of the terms ‘mood’ and ‘modality’ can take the
terms for granted and that one should always explain what one means.

Notes

1 Thanks are due to Aikaterini Chatzopoulou (Chicago), Lars Larm (Lund) and to
Vladimir Plungian (Moscow).

2 For an overview of other traditions and interactions with the Western traditions see Larm
(2006, 2009), Narrog (2009) and Masuoka (2009) for Japanese, and Li (2004: 106-109) for
Chinese.

 18

3 An unsuccessful proposal to have a term based on Greek was made by Hare (1970: 21)
with tropic.

4 The most influential application of Kant’s categories to twentieth century linguistics is

the set of Grice’s four maxims (Grice 1975).. Grice kept the labels ‘quantity’, ‘quality’ and
‘relation’, but he replaced ‘modality’ with ‘manner’, thereby also returning to the original
sense of modus. In French, however, Grice’s ‘manner’ is sometimes translated as modalité,
competing with manière (e.g. Day 2008: 85).

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