Rethinking Mood: A Radically New Approach to Romance Mood
Name of applicant
Anders Andersen
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
The university in Turin
Amount
DKK 550,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
This project seeks to rethink the way we conceive the mood contrast between the subjunctive and the indicative in Romance languages. By challenging old assumptions about mood that have yet to prove tenable, it aims to develop an alternate approach capable of addressing some of the difficulties that both native speakers and leaners experience in trying to grasp the meaning of mood.
Why?
Mood is notoriously tricky, confounding both native speakers and learners alike. Thus, there is a clear need for a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. However, despite extensive research, we are stuck in the old assumption that indicatives must denote something real and subjunctives something unreal. This project aims to remedy this situation by developing a new understanding of mood.
How?
The approach to be developed in this project hinges on the distinction between a so-called "State-of-Affairs" and a "Proposition". While this distinction has helped clarify how sentences are constructed cross-linguistically, it surprisingly has not received much attention in relation to mood. Therefore, this project applies the distinction to analyze mood contrasts across Romance languages.