7 Major Moods
Expressions of a language can be used to perform the following speech acts:- Questioning
- Stating, promising, threatening, predicting
- Requesting, commanding, ordering, pleading
Correlated with each type of speech act is a condition of satisfaction:l. Questioning is correlated with an "answerhood condition."
- Stating is correlated with a "truth condition."
- Requesting is correlated with a "compliance condition."
Each speech act/satisfaction condition pair is in turn correlated with a form. The
resulting triple is termed an instance of a particular mood:- Questioning is associated, directly, with the interrogative mood.
- Stating is associated with the declarative mood.
- Requesting is associated with the imperative mood.
The following are examples, in English, of the three major moods.Interrogative mood- Will he leave?
The person who utters sentence 1 is performing a speech act of questioning,
which requires the hearer to supply the speaker with the answer. That is, the
answerhood condition is operative.Declarative mood- John left the room.
Taken as a statement (i.e., as an instance of the speech act of stating), sentence
2 is either true or false. Truth or falsity is the relevant notion here-the truth
condition is operative.Imperative mood- Leave the room!
ai
Taken as an order (i.e., as an instance of the speech act of ordering), sentence (^3 2)
involves compliance. The hearer is to do what the sentence describes (in this case, g 2
the speaker intends that the hearer leave the room). The compliance condition is C
operative. E
G 2
For each language the speech actlsatisfaction condition/form pairing is different.
That is, different languages choose different syntactic, morphological, and/or^0 N 0
phonological (intonation) devices to signal the major moods.