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Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics: 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos Gramaticais
Edited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 33–66

Chapter 1
Mood alternations in the history of German

The architecture of epistemic weakening

| Ludwig Maximilian University at Munich | University of Vienna
Non-veridicality is at the heart of more than just the verbal subjunctive. The main distinction we drew is the free application of the subjunctive and the non-veridical mood in dependent sentences. Greek and the Romance languages are among the representatives of this syntactic-semantic design of the subjunctive in syntactic dependency. While this was the case in past periods of German, the use of the subjunctive in dependent sentences and in free occurrence came to enact chains of indirect and reported speech. Colloquial modern German uses the subjunctive as an expression of non-veridicality no longer as an instantiation of mood, but of attitude, of illocutionary Force (in Rizzi’s CP-expansion). Two questions are addressed: (1) How are nonverbal categories related to mood; (2) What has triggered the diachronic loss of epistemic expression in colloquial German.
Keywords: assertivity, Cimbrian (Old Bavarian), Middle and Old High German, modern German, speech act autonomy, subjunctive vs. indicative mood
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reportative competence in modern German
  • 3.Breaking the ground for term and content of epistemic weakening
  • 4.Epistemic weakening: The case of predicative epistemics as verbal mood in subordinate clauses – synchronic and diachronic stages
  • 5.Epistemic weakening: The case of relative clauses and mood alternation
    • 5.1Cimbrian
  • 6.Epistemic weakening: Force types of subordinators
    • 6.1
    • 6.2Summary
  • 7.Conclusion: Present and past subjunctive in modern German
    • 7.1Matrix predicates as epistemic weakeners
    • 7.2Non-specificity as an epistemic weakener in attributes and relative clauses
    • 7.3Epistemic weakening on complementizers
    • 7.4Negation as an epistemic weakener
  • 8.Outgoing: The main and most general points
  • 9.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 8 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.260.01abr
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