On Characteristics Of Meanings In Non-Indicative Moods

In normal conversations, spoken utterances, in all languages, actually have two parts: one is the fact of the sentence spoken by an addresser; the other expresses the cognitive pattern, and attitude of an addresser. And the latter refers to the mood of sentences. Mood is an important grammatical category in that it plays a particularly significant part in human communication.A large number of researchers are attracted by mood category and great achievements have been made. However, it is a pity that most of works on mood are focused on mood and modality or describe mood from the perspective of systematic functional grammar. Of course, there are works that explore the non-indicative moods, but we noted that the study of non-indicative moods is just imposed to the study of the Old and New Testament in Greek language, there are few on other languages,nor is in English language.This thesis is focused on the characteristics of non-indicative moods systematically and by various approaches, and we consider some suggestions on how non-indicatives may be brought within the reach of the sort of truth-based semantics, alternatively, they are expressed in sentence types and in modality. Plenty of previous researches into verbal aspect in Ancient Greek has centered on the indicative mood, and with good reason. The study is more developed within the non-indicative moods, which are missing from the indicative mood-though the future indeed appears rarely. Consequently, the more complicated series of oppositions within the indicative mood call for penetrating analysis as to the nature of such oppositions. Besides, there is little study on non-indicative moods in English language. Therefore, this thesis is almost a first attempt in non-indicative moods.This thesis is divided into five sections.Chapter 1 introduces literature review, definition and classifications of non-indicative moods as well as significance and purposes of the thesis.Chapter 2 describes the relationship between indicative and non-indicative moods and this can be taken as a base of the next chapter.Chapter 3 and chapter 4 are devoted to summarizing the characteristics of meanings in non-indicative moods in two aspects: sentence types and modality. Lyons (2000:177) pointed out in his book that there is a connexion between sentence type and mood. Therefore, in order to explore more deeply about the characteristics of meanings in non-indicative moods, we have to get a clear picture of meanings of non-indicative moods in non-declarative sentences. So the third section mainly deal with meanings of non-declarative sentences by depicting subjunctive conditional sentences, interrogative sentences, imperative sentences and exclamatory sentences respectively and finally find out the characteristics of meanings in non-declarative sentences. Mood and modality has been closely connected since the study of mood, so the fourth section aims to explore non-indicative moods in modality and further explode language meanings in various non-indicative moods and summarize characteristics of meanings of non-indicative moods in modality.Chapter 5 summarizes the results of this thesis, points out the inadequacies and the room for the further research.