LINGUIST List 2.303

Tuesday, 18 June 1991

Disc: Indirect Objects, Mood

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Aleksander Murzaku, Re: Indirect Object Agreement
2. , IO Agreement
3. , Mood
4. John E. Koontz, Re: Moods

I have not read the original query on this subject but looking at the answers
I think that Albanian language presents some interest (bulgare and macedonian
as other Balkan languages too).
The indirect object requires always a clitic which agree with the object before
the verb. The use is already obligatory and is pronounced as part of the verb.
The same phenomena can be observed with the direct object but there, the
clitic can be omitted for the 3d person. The rest is grammaticalised.
Examples: Indirect Object
mE jep mua 'CL(=to me) give to me' - Without the clitic the construction is
 ungrammatical. (the same for all persons)
 Direct Object
mE merr mua 'CL(=me) take me' tE merr ty 'CL(=you[sing]) take you[sing]'
na merr ne 'CL(=us) take us' ju merr ju 'CL(=you[plur]) take you[plur]'
In all these examples the use of the clitic is obligatory. But not yet in this:
e merr atE 'Cl(=him) take him' but also merr atE 'take him' (plural also)
/* the letter 'E' stays for 'e dieresis'=schwa */
AleksandEr Murzaku
Scuola Normale Superiore
Piazza dei Cavalieri, 7
I-56126 PISA
internet: murzakuvaxsns.infn.it

Some dialects of Spanish are reliably reported to require what is
traditionally called a dative clitic whenever there is an IO, su
ch that you can only say le di a Juan un regalo, but not *di a Juan
un regalo. But the same is not the case for DO, so that you can
still say vi a Juan and do not have to say le vi a Juan. This
would be a very straightforward case of IO, but not DO, agreement,
it seems to me. However, I cannot at the moment identify the
relevant dialects or the best references to this phenomenon. Can
someone more up on Spanish help?

In response to the queries about mood: there is no taxonomic
terminology agreed upon for mood in general that I am aware of;
just in French alone there are disagreements about whether there
is a conditional mood or whether one should talk simply about the
conditional as tense. I am also not comfortable with statements
that the subjunctive is only found in dependent clauses - this too
is open to debate and depends in part on whether we accept what
look like independent clauses as having a deleted complementizer
(my examples are from French and English where it is easy to argue
that _God bless you_ and _vive le roi_ are frozen expressions -
I believe Italian is more productive). It might help to think about
the difference between mood and modality where the former is morpho-
logical and the latter semantic.
I'd be interested in hearing why the questions are being asked: I've
been struggling with the semantics of mood in Old and modern French
for a while.
 Margaret Winters
 Southern Illinois Univ.
 <ga3704siucvmb.bitnet>

In addition to Bert Peeters' response to ffjal1's query:
A term which unambiguously refers to moods that express a desire for
something to happen would be desiderative, or possibly optative. I agree
that subjunctive is not appropriate for this. It refers to a mood used in
subordinate clauses, often under a verb expressing desire, but not
necessarily so.