7 Major Moods

Expressions of a language can be used to perform the following speech acts:

1.Questioning

2.Stating, promising, threatening, predicting

3.Requesting, commanding, ordering, pleading

Correlated with each type of speech act is a condition of satisfaction:

l. Questioning is correlated with an "answerhood condition."

2.Stating is correlated with a "truth condition."

3.Requesting is correlated with a "compliance condition."

Each speech act/satisfaction condition pair is in turn correlated with a form. The resulting triple is termed an instance of a particular mood:

1.Questioning is associated, directly, with the interrogative mood.

2.Stating is associated with the declarative mood.

3.Requesting is associated with the imperative mood.

The following are examples, in English, of the three major moods.

Interrogative mood

1. Will he leave?

The person who utters sentence 1 is performing a speech act of questioning, which requires the hearer to supply the speaker with the answer. That is, the answerhood condition is operative.

Declarative mood

2. John left the room.

Taken as a statement (i.e., as an instance of the speech act of stating), sentence 2 is either true or false. Truth or falsity is the relevant notion here-the truth condition is operative.

Imperative mood

3. Leave the room!

Taken as an order (i.e., as an instance of the speech act of ordering), sentence 3 involves compliance. The hearer is to do what the sentence describes (in this case, the speaker intends that the hearer leave the room). The compliance condition is operative.

For each language the speech actlsatisfaction condition/form pairing is different. That is, different languages choose different syntactic, morphological, and/or phonological (intonation) devices to signal the major moods.

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