Article published In:
Studies in LanguageVol. 18:2 (1994) ► pp.265–337
Irrealis and the Subjunctive
This paper suggest that in order to understand the cross-language distribution of the subjunctive mood one needs to understand the cross-grammar distribution of the irrealis modality, as well as have a general theory of modality, within which irrealis takes its rightful natural place. The subjunctive mood turns out to occupy two coherent sub regions within irrealis: (a) the subjunctive of lower certainty (within the epistemic sub-mode of irrealis), and (b) the subjunctive of weaker manipulation (within the deontic sub-mode of irrealis). A grammaticalized subjunctive may take the same form in both sub-modes (as in Romance), or two distinct forms (as in some Bantu languages). The paper also investigates the diachronic pathways of grammaticalization through which various subjunctive patterns arise, showing that analogical extension patterns exist in both directions — from deontic to epistemic and vice versa. The interaction between grammaticalization patterns and functional universals is also discussed.
Cited by
Cited by 103 other publications
Allan, K.
2006. Mood, Clause Types, and Illocutionary Force. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, ► pp. 267 ff. 
Allan, Keith
2006. Clause-type, primary illocution, and mood-like operators in English. Language Sciences 28:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Andersen, Anders
2022. Volition and mood in Italian: a study of the state-of-affairs subjunctive. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 54:2 ► pp. 161 ff.
Beier, Christine, Cynthia Hansen, I-wen Lai & Lev Michael
2011. Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: Reality status in Iquito. Linguistic Typology 15:1
Bocale, Paola
2018. The Irrealis Use of the DeicticTAMin Contemporary Russian. Scando-Slavica 64:2 ► pp. 175 ff.
Boneh, Nora & Łukasz Jędrzejowski
2019. Reflections on habituality across other grammatical categories. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 72:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Bonevac, Daniel
2019. Free choice reasons. Synthese 196:2 ► pp. 735 ff.
Brinton, Laurel J.
2012. The grammaticalization of complex predicates. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 559 ff.
Contini-Morava, Ellen
2012. The message in the navel: (ir)realis and negation in Swahili. Language Sciences 34:2 ► pp. 200 ff.
Couper‐Kuhlen, Elizabeth
2012. Grammaticalization and conversation. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 424 ff.
Cristofaro, Sonia
2010. Review of Vajda (2008): Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages. Studies in Language 34:3 ► pp. 680 ff.
Cristofaro, Sonia
2012. Descriptive notions vs. grammatical categories: Unrealized states of affairs and ‘irrealis’. Language Sciences 34:2 ► pp. 131 ff.
Darzi, Ali & Saera Kwak
2015. Syntax and semantics of subjunctive clauses in Persian. Lingua 153 ► pp. 1 ff.
De Decker, Filip
2022. The difference between the optative and the “modal” indicative in Homeric Greek: four case studies. Part 1: The optative. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 139:3 ► pp. 157 ff.
De Mulder, Walter & Anne Carlier
2012. The grammaticalization of definite articles. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 522 ff.
Deen, Kamil Ud & Nina Hyams
2006. The morphosyntax of mood in early grammar with special reference to Swahili. First Language 26:1 ► pp. 67 ff.
Demonie, Anne-Li
2021. The complementary distribution between nē and nōn revisited: a semantic approach to wish and result clauses. Journal of Latin Linguistics 20:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
Dobrushina, Nina
2012. Subjunctive complement clauses in Russian. Russian Linguistics 36:2 ► pp. 121 ff.
DUNMIRE, PATRICIA L.
1997. Naturalizing the Future in Factual Discourse. Written Communication 14:2 ► pp. 221 ff.
Finholt, Aron & John Gluckman
2023. A corpus analysis of Swahili’s dual-complementizer system. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 44:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Fischer, Olga
2012. Grammaticalization as analogically driven change?. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 31 ff.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt
2012. Grammaticalization of reference systems. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 625 ff.
Gisborne, Nikolas & Amanda Patten
2012. Construction grammar and grammaticalization. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 92 ff.
Givón, T.
Gonzálvez-García, Francisco
2018. Taming iconicity in the Spanish and Italian translations of Shakespeare’sSonnets. English Text Construction 11:1 ► pp. 105 ff.
GÜVEN, Meriç & Laçin ÖZĞÜL
2023. Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı’nın Romanlarında -mIş bulun Yapılı Cümlelerin Bilgi Kipliğindeki Görünümü. Korkut Ata Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi :11 ► pp. 48 ff.
Haan, Ferdinand de
2012. Irrealis: fact or fiction?. Language Sciences 34:2 ► pp. 107 ff.
Harder, Peter & Kasper Boye
2012. Grammaticalization and functional linguistics. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 56 ff.
Heine, Bernd
2012. Grammaticalization in African languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 696 ff.
Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog
2011. The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization,
Hilpert, Martin
2012. Grammaticalization in Germanic languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 708 ff.
Hunnius, Klaus
2015. Sprachgeschichte und Sprachvariation. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 131:3 ► pp. 587 ff.
Iatridou, Sabine
2000. The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality. Linguistic Inquiry 31:2 ► pp. 231 ff.
Johnson, Greg
2018. The syntax of liketa. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 36:4 ► pp. 1129 ff.
KOCKELMAN, PAUL
2004. Stance and Subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14:2 ► pp. 127 ff.
Kockelman, Paul
2006. Psychological depth is the internalization of dialogical breadth: Modal clitics and mental states in Q’eqchi’-Maya. Language & Communication 26:1 ► pp. 55 ff.
Kupferberg, Irit & Izhak Gilat
2013. The discursive self-construction of suicidal help seekers in computer-mediated discourse. Communication and Medicine 9:1 ► pp. 23 ff.
König, Christa
2012. The grammaticalization of adpositions and case marking. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 511 ff.
la Roi, Ezra
2023. Down the paths to the past habitual: its historical connections with counterfactual pasts, future in the pasts, iteratives and lexical sources in Ancient Greek. Folia Linguistica 57:s44-s1 ► pp. 87 ff.
Lamiroy, Béatrice & Walter De Mulder
2012. Degrees of grammaticalization across languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 302 ff.
Lenepveu-Hotz, Agnès
2014. The evolution of the Persian aspecto-modal suffix-ē, between the 10th and the 16th centuries. Journal of Historical Linguistics 4:2 ► pp. 232 ff.
Lightfoot, Douglas
2012. Grammaticalization and lexicalization. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 438 ff.
Lustres, Eduardo, Alejandro Cuza & Aída García-Tejada
2020. Chapter 15. The acquisition of obligatory and variable mood selection in epistemic predicates by L2 learners and heritage speakers of Spanish. In Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 27], ► pp. 319 ff.
Martelotta, Mário Eduardo T. & Maria Maura Cezario
2012. Grammaticalization in Brazilian Portuguese. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 729 ff.
Massery, Laurie A. & Claudio Fuentes
2014. Morphological variability at the morphosyntactic/semantic interface. ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics 165:1 ► pp. 46 ff.
Masuoka, Takashi
2009. Modality from a Japanese Perspective. In Japanese Modality, ► pp. 36 ff.
Matić, Dejan & Irina Nikolaeva
2014. Realis mood, focus, and existential closure in Tundra Yukaghir. Lingua 150 ► pp. 202 ff.
Mauri, Caterina & Andrea Sansò
2012. What do languages encode when they encode reality status?. Language Sciences 34:2 ► pp. 99 ff.
Mezhevich, Ilana
2008. A feature-theoretic account of tense and aspect in Russian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 26:2 ► pp. 359 ff.
Narrog, Heiko & Bernd Heine
2012. Introduction. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 1 ff.
Narrog, Heiko & Johan van der Auwera
2012. Grammaticalization and semantic maps. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 318 ff.
Nevalainen, Terttu & Minna Palander-Collin
2012. Grammaticalization and sociolinguistics. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 118 ff.
Nicolle, Steve
2012. Pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 401 ff.
Nowikow, Wiaczeslaw
1998. La alternancia modal IND/SUBJ en la estructura informativa del enunciado. In Travaux de linguistique hispanique, ► pp. 375 ff.
Ohori, Toshio
2012. The Grammaticalization of subordination. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 636 ff.
Operstein, Natalie
2014. Origin of the Zapotec Causative Marker*k-: A Diachronic-Typological Perspective. International Journal of American Linguistics 80:1 ► pp. 99 ff.
Patard, Adeline
2014. When tense and aspect convey modality. Reflections on the modal uses of past tenses in Romance and Germanic languages. Journal of Pragmatics 71 ► pp. 69 ff.
Pedrós, Toni
2019. Reality status in Kampan languages and its partial loss in Ucayali-Pajonal Ashéninka. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 19 ► pp. e019007 ff.
Perez-Cortes, Silvia
2022. Lexical frequency and morphological regularity as sources of heritage speaker variability in the acquisition of mood. Second Language Research 38:1 ► pp. 149 ff.
Pfau, Roland & Markus Steinbach
2012. Grammaticalization in sign languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 683 ff.
Pratas, Fernanda
2018. Progressive forms and meanings: the curious case of Capeverdean. Estudos de Lingüística Galega 10 ► pp. 103 ff.
Prince, Kilu von & Anna Margetts
Ramat, Anna Giacalone & Caterina Mauri
2012. The grammaticalization of coordinating interclausal connectives. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 656 ff.
Ramat, Paolo
2012. Adverbial grammaticalization. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 502 ff.
Raumolin‐Brunberg, Helena & Arja Nurmi
2012. Grammaticalization and language change in the individual. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 251 ff.
Salmon, William
2016. Irrealis and emphatic. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 37:3 ► pp. 323 ff.
Siegel, Laura
2009. Mood selection in Romance and Balkan. Lingua 119:12 ► pp. 1859 ff.
Song, Jae Jung
1996. From purposive to manner in Korean: A semantic‐pragmatic change of subjectification. Australian Journal of Linguistics 16:2 ► pp. 209 ff.
Song, Jae Jung
1997. The so-called Plural Copy in Korean as a marker of distribution and focus. Journal of Pragmatics 27:2 ► pp. 203 ff.
Sánchez López, Cristina
2018. Chapter 17. Romance evaluative que/che/să sentences as inverted optatives. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 14], ► pp. 293 ff.
Sánchez-Naranjo, Jeannette & Ana T. Pérez-Leroux
2010. In the wrong mood at the right time: Children’s acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive in temporal clauses. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 55:2 ► pp. 227 ff.
Torigoe, Shintaro
2013. Portuguese Future / Future Preterit and Present / Preterit Indicative: A Collocational Comparison. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 95 ► pp. 195 ff.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2012. Grammaticalization and mechanisms of change. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 19 ff.
van Gelderen, Elly
2012. The grammaticalization of agreement. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 491 ff.
van Gelderen, Elly
2012. Grammaticalization and generative grammar: a difficult liaison. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 43 ff.
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe
2006. The role of mood marking in complex sentences A case study of Australian languages. <i>WORD</i> 57:2-3 ► pp. 195 ff.
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe
2008. The status of purpose, reason, and intended endpoint in the typology of complex sentences: implications for layered models of clause structure. Linguistics 46:4
Villalta, Elisabeth
2008. Mood and gradability: an investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish. Linguistics and Philosophy 31:4 ► pp. 467 ff.
von Prince, Kilu
2019. Counterfactuality and past. Linguistics and Philosophy 42:6 ► pp. 577 ff.
von Prince, Kilu, Ana Krajinović, Anna Margetts, Nick Thieberger & Valérie Guérin
2019. Habituality in four Oceanic languages of Melanesia. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 72:1 ► pp. 21 ff.
Waltereit, Richard
2012. Grammaticalization and discourse. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 413 ff.
Wang, Caixia
2023. Les valeurs modales du conditionnel français et du « huì » chinois mandarin. La linguistique Vol. 59:1 ► pp. 83 ff.
Wang, Jia
2023. Linguistic Analyses of Negation in Chinese, English, and Korean. In Interfaces and Features in Second Language Acquisition, ► pp. 45 ff.
Watanabe, Akira
1996. Nominative-genitive conversion and agreement in Japanese: A cross-linguistic perspective. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 5:4 ► pp. 373 ff.
Willmott, Jo
2008. The ‘potential’ optative in Homeric Greek. The Cambridge Classical Journal 54 ► pp. 237 ff.
Wu, Xi
2023. A Discourse Analysis of Suicide Tendency in Photographer Lu Dawson’s Posts on Public Acconts: An Approach of Non-real World and Real World. International Journal of Education and Humanities 10:1 ► pp. 84 ff.
Yoon, Suwon
2013. Parametric variation in subordinate evaluative negation: Korean/Japanese versus others. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 133 ff.
Zheng, Wuxi
2022. The final particle uè in Longxi Qiang: A marker of realis and stance. Journal of Pragmatics 189 ► pp. 17 ff.
Zheng, Zhang, Sho Fukuda, Laurence Newbery-Payton, Tomohito Ishida & YaMing Shen
2023. Acquisition of the Chinese Auxiliaries: Insights from Cross-Referential Learners’ Corpora of Chinese, English, and Japanese. In Learner Corpora: Construction and Explorations in Chinese and Related Languages [Chinese Language Learning Sciences, ], ► pp. 289 ff.
Zhu, Jialei
2023. A more special use of the third person singular pronoun in Shanghainese. Language and Linguistics. 語言暨語言學 24:2 ► pp. 391 ff.
Ziegeler, D.P.
2006. Mood and Modality in Grammar. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, ► pp. 259 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
1995. Diachronic factors in the grammaticalization of counterfactual implicatures in Singaporean English. Language Sciences 17:4 ► pp. 305 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
2000. The role of quantity implicatures in the grammaticalisation of would. Language Sciences 22:1 ► pp. 27 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
2000. What almost can reveal about counterfactual inferences. Journal of Pragmatics 32:12 ► pp. 1743 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
2006. Omnitemporal will. Language Sciences 28:1 ► pp. 76 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
2012. The grammaticalization of modality. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. 595 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
2012. On the interaction of past tense and potentiality in Singaporean Colloquial English. Language Sciences 34:2 ► pp. 229 ff.
Ziegeler, Debra
Zingler, Tim
2022. Circumfixation: A semasiological approach. Word Structure 15:1 ► pp. 55 ff.
[no author supplied]
2011. Dedication. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. v ff.
[no author supplied]
2011. Copyright Page. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2011. The contributors. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. xii ff.
[no author supplied]
2011. Abbreviations. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, ► pp. xxviii ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.