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Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with a strongly growing body of crosslinguistic studies, have revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these categories. This book argues that it’s time to revisit our conventional assumptions and reconsider our foundational questions: What exactly is a linguistic category? What kinds of categories to labels such as “subjunctive,” “imperative,” “future,” and “modality” truly refer to? In short, how categorical are categories? Current literature assumes a straightforward link between grammatical category and semantic function, and descriptions of well-studied languages have cultivated a sense of predictability in patterns over time. However, this predictability and stability vanish in the study of lesser-known patterns and languages. The ten provocative essays gathered here present fascinating cutting-edge research demonstrating that the traditional grammatical distinctions are ultimately fluid, and perhaps even illusory. Developing groundbreaking and highly original theories, the contributors in this volume seek to unravel more general, fundamental principles of TAM that can help us better understand the nature of linguistic representations.

This book is about how the concepts of truth, knowledge, and, broadly speaking, belief are reflected and codified in the grammar of natural languages. Does language directly access the world (what is true), or does it do so via semantic representations of the world categories? Natural languages vary in the vocabulary, form, and grammatical categories they realize; yet in addressing the question of language and thought, most Continental philosophy overlooks this striking variation and almost exclusively focuses on English. This book explores the interaction between truth, knowledge, and veridicality as they interact in the grammatical phenomenon of mood choice (subjunctive, indicative), a phenomenon not systematically observed in English. Our main languages of study are Standard Modern Greek and the Romance language family, with specific emphasis on Italian and French. Mood choice is a multidimensional phenomenon involving interactions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Mood selection relies heavily on the semantics of the main clause verb, which is called a propositional attitude verb. The book addresses the meaning of various classes of propositional attitude verbs—epistemic, doxastic, memory, volitional, deontic, and modal attitudes—and find that the crucial property for mood choice is the veridicality or nonveridicality of the attitude verb. Modal verbs, the book concludes, are very similar to propositional attitudes. The book offers philosophical discussion on the nature of belief, knowledge, emotive and modal mental states, and conclude that speakers form veridicality judgments to assess the truth or falsity of sentences based on knowledge, evidence, and expectations and desires.