Statements, questions, commands

1- Speakers can make statements about situations – This is happening, That happened.

They can ask questions about situations and about participants in situations – Is this happening?, Did that happen?

They can require or request that a particular situation be created or not created – Do this, don’t do that.

2- They can present situations as factual – This happened, This did happen.

They can present situations as possible – This might happen.

They can present situations as necessary – This has to happen, That must happen.

3- They can state their authority for making a statement – Evidently, she has decided to change jobs, I know for a fact that this plane is unsafe.

4- They can present situations as the objects of wishes, hopes, fears – I wish he had better manners, She’s afraid he’s going to make a fool of himself.

On constructions we looked at two of the constructions in (1), the declarative construction and the yes–no interrogative construction. There we described the arrangements of words into phrases and the syntactic differences between the two; here we are interested in the uses to which speakers put the constructions, and add the imperative construction which can be used to issue instructions and requests. (But in many situations, speakers do not use the imperative )

The examples in (3) are not normally discussed under the heading of mood, but the concept of mood should be extended to take them in. One reason is that the distinction between making a statement, asking a question and issuing a command is not sufficient, because speakers make assertions with different degrees of certainty and authority. In English, these degrees are signaled by means of adverbs such as evidently or apparently, and by phrases such as for a fact. There is some controversy as to whether a given speaker makes a stronger assertion by means of That’s the guy who attacked the policemen or That must be the guy who attacked the policemen. An earlier view was that the former was the stronger assertion, but another, more recent, view is that the former is neutral and that it is the speaker who utters must be who expresses the stronger commitment to the proposition [THAT GUY ATTACK THE POLICEMEN].

A second reason for extending the discussion is that there are languages, such as Turkish, in which degrees of certainty are obligatorily expressed; speakers who have seen an event with their own eyes must use one set of verb forms while speakers who have not witnessed it but merely heard about it from others must use another set of verb forms.