description
The paper discusses mood not only in terms of the verb and its modality, but also as a morphosyntactic category able to influence sentence formation in terms of syntax, a sentence being a well-formed unit of message communication. It presents verbal as well as non-verbal and clausal means to express modality in Slovene, and how they may be used to express the sentence-forming mood. Within the so-called verbal mood paradigm, which may also be marked morphologically, there are the indicative, imperative, and conditional moods, but also notably the lexicalized descriptive optative mood attested in such fixed expressions as Naj pride “let him come”, Naj bo “let there be”, Daj naredi(te) “go and do”. It is these descriptive modal verb forms that warrant an analysis of mood as a morphosyntactic phenomenon. Since some forms of a specific verbal mood have been lexicalized, mood must be a language-specific morphosyntactic category. Additionally, verbal mood is a basic and fundamental part of sentence-forming mood. Sentence formation consists of the speaker and their communicative intention, and the so-called morphosyntactic modal modification of a sentence, both of which establish the basic relations between pragmatics, semantics and syntax. The speaker’s input into sentence formation is shown to be the key to this, and therefore the most basic tenet of modality analysis, the analysis of modal means of verbalizing communicative roles and patterns. For this reason, as it is the specifying as well as distinctive property of any communicative sentence formation, modality (naklonskost) contains the suffix “-ost” typical of communicative roles in Slovene; the grammar of Slovene attests pripovednost (oznanjalnost) “declarativity”, vprašalnost “interrogativity”, velelnost (pozivnost) “imperativity”, and želelnost “optativity”, which is a typology congruent with the one of communicative roles. The paper also discusses a hypothesis stating that sentence formation enables distinguishing propositional modality within the predicator from non-propositional modality, which cannot be an element of any typical propositional unit. As such, deadjectival adverbs of quality, particles and interjections can only be non-propositional elements.