Clause-type, primary illocution, and mood-like operators in English

This paper is about the semantics of English clause-types and of the subsentences (a generic term for subclauses and clause or sentence fragments) that function like clauses. The formal defining characteristics for declarative, interrogative, imperative, hypothetical, and expressive clauses and subsentences, and their exclamative counterparts, are described in terms of lexical, morphosyntactic and prosodic marking, their characteristics in main and subordinate clauses, and under negation. The main focus is upon their semantic properties identified in terms of their typical primary illocution (PI). The PI is the semantics (rather than pragmatics) of the clause-type; the PI is often identifiable with ‘mood’; but we shall see that the traditional term mood does not adequately fit what we find. The binary category realis–irrealis is more appropriate. I discuss relations between mood, the realis–irrealis distinction, clause-type, and illocution in English. Declaratives (PI T), interrogatives (PI Q) and imperatives (PI I) are in contrast with one another, and all three in contrast with one very small set of just two hypotheticals (PI H) and a somewhat larger set of idiomatic subsentences that have the primary illocution of expressives (PI X). Most hypotheticals occur within the scope of T, Q, I or X where they modify the interpretation to hypotheticality. Although hypotheticals have sometimes been called ‘subjunctives’, there is a conflict with traditional notions of the exclusivity of moods. Exclamatives all occur as modifications of the other five clause-types or subsentences.