Lecture # 4 Grammatical category of the verb: the mood in English.

SRS-class.

A relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in number.

When a relative pronoun is used as subject of the verb in the relative clause, the number of the verb depends upon the verb of the pronoun’s antecedent.

1. These are the designers who are / is planning our new house.

2. Janet is the girl who plays / play the drums in the school orchestra.

3. Phil is one of those boys who are / is always happy.

4. Liz is the only one of the girls who has / have a scholarship.

4. This is one of those stories that seem / seems to have no ending.

5. Carlotta is the only one of the aides who works / work closely with the Governor.

6. Shelly is the one in our lab group who like / likes chemistry.

7. Each of the races has / have his / their car ready.

8. One of the lifeguards dived from her / their chair.

The indefinite pronouns all, some, any, most, and none may be referred to by a singular or plural pronoun, depending on the meaning intended.

1. Some of the maple syrup has lost its / their flavour.

2. Some of the students have seen their / his pictures.

3. Al the equipment was / were in its / their proper place.

4. All the backfield were / was playing their / its best game.

5. The football team has / have its / their plays.

6. Some of the band are / is wearing their / its new gold and blue uniforms.

7. None of the door –to –door salesmen were / was doing their / his best.

8. The doctor dropped her / his time.

1. The numeral.

The verb as the basic part of speech (morphological level) has predicative functions in the sentence (syntactic level) – establishing connection between the situation (event) named in the utterance and the reality. Predicative functions are mostly realized in tense, aspect, voice and mood. The grammatical meaning of the verb is to express process. The verb has finite and non-finite sets of forms (infinitive, gerund, present and past participle). The verb has the categories as follows: person, number, tense, aspect, voice and mood.

The Mood.

The category of mood expresses the character of connection between the process denoted by the verb and the actual reality, either presenting the process as a fact that really happened, happens or will happen, or showing it as an imaginary phenomenon, i.e. the subject of hypothesis, speculation, desire, etc. So, the mood denotes a real or unreal action (event, or situation in the whole construction) by means of opposite forms of the Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive. The complexity of the matter is, sometimes, in the non – coincidence of meaning and form.

The Indefinite Mood denotes a real action, i.e., an action placed in the (current) course of time. The statement in it can be true or false, for it is not imaginary.

The Imperative denotes an order (Do it!, Be careful!), It relates to the second person. It has no pronoun acting as subject, however in emotional speech it can be explicitly expressed (You leave me alone).

The Subjunctive denotes wish (Be it as you wish), desire (God forgive us), demand (It is important that the elections start on Monday). These verbal forms show that within the general meaning of desired or hypothetical action they signify different attitudes to the action. They may be supposition, speculation, suggestion, recommendation, or inducement of various degrees of insistence.

Transformations: Do it! → I demand that you do it (attitude of order), God forgive us → I want, would like that God forgive(s) us.

Another point deals with how the time is expressed in analyzed forms, e. g. ‘It was recommended that the elections start on Monday.’ Indeed, in the Indicative the category of time is essentially absolute while in the Subjunctive the present stem is used not to denote the time but to show the unreality of the desired action. Timing of process in the Conditionals is relative, for an action is performed in the light of another one, or relatively to another one. The moods denote not only reality or unreality but also the attitude of the speaker to the denoted action (event). This attitude can be termed as modality which is the appropriate characteristic of the English verb and, consequently, of the speech (she must have been tired, she might have been tired, she could have been tired, I wish he would come).

Mood and Modality in written scientific discourse

Modality is a feature of discourse worth attending to for critical purposes. It refers to the tone of statements as regards their degree of certainty and authority. It is carried mainly by words and phrases like may, might, could, will, must, it seems to me, without a doubt, it is possible that, etc. Through the use of such modal verbs and phrases, some texts convey an air of heavy-handed authority while others, at the other extreme, convey a tone of deference.

One of the most important aspects of a discourse (a scientific discourse, as an example) is to weigh evidence and draw conclusions from data. Fundamental characteristics of science are uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. Stubbs (1986) argues that all sentences encode a point of view and that academic texts are not deferent in containing the author’s presence: scientists inevitably indicate their attitude in their writings. Science is not the coolly objective discipline as asserted in many textbooks and scientific style guides, academic writings cannot be considered as a series of impersonal statements of facts which add up to the truth. Moreover, research from a variety of disciplines (e.g., sociology of science) has revealed ways in which academic discourse is both socially situated and structured to accomplish rhetorical objectives.

Linguistically these objectives are realized as hedges – mostly verbal and adverbial expressions such as can, perhaps, may, suggest, which deal with degrees of probability. Hedges can be considered as the interactive elements which serve as a bridge between the propositional information in the text and the writer’s factual interpretation. As Skelton remarks, hedges could be viewed as part of the larger phenomenon called commentative potentials of any language. Natural languages are reflective: not only saying things, but also reflecting on the status of what they say.

In one of the first explorations of this phenomenon, Lakoff defined hedges as words or phrases, “whose job is to make things fuzzy or less fuzzy” (1972: 175), implying that writers are less than fully committed to the certainty of the referential information they present in their writings. One could state a proposition as a fact (e.g., “This medicine will help you recover quickly”, or one could use a hedge to distance oneself from the statement, e.g., I believe that this medicine could help you recover quickly).”

Research on LSP (Languages for Specific Purposes) has repeatedly shown that hedges are crucial in academic discourse because they are a central rhetorical means of gaining a communal adherence to knowledge claims. Indeed, scientific “truth” is as much the product of a social as that an intellectual activity, and the need to convince one’s fellow scientists of the facticity of experimental results (or of the correctness of a specific point of view) explains the widespread use of hedges in this type of discourse. Hyland (1994), for example, asserts that hedging exhibits a level of frequency much higher than many other linguistic features which have received considerably more attention. Skelton (1988) argues that epistemic comments are equally common in the arts and sciences, occurring overall in between one third and one half of all sentences.

Four reasons for hedging

1. The most widely accepted view is that hedging is the process whereby authors tone down their statements in order to reduce the risk of opposition and minimize the “threat-to-face” that lurks behind every act of communication. This position associates hedges with scientific imprecision and defines them as linguistic cues of bias which avoid personal accountability for statements, i.e., as understatements used to convey evasiveness, tentativeness, fuzziness, mitigation of responsibility and/or mitigation of certainty to the truth value of a proposition. In this view, hedging is what Skelton calls “the politician’s craft,” not only a willed mitigation but an obfuscation for dubious purposes. Kubui (1988) and Fand (1989), for example, state that hedges are used to signal distance and avoid absolute statements which might put scientists (and the institution they work) in an embarrassing situation if subsequent conflicting evidence or contradictory findings arise. The following sentence, which ended a paper in a university conference illustrates this use of hedging:

Our students seem to suggest that in Third World countries the extensive use of land to grow exportation products tends to impoverish these countries’ populations even more.

The epistemic verb ‘seem’ combined with the modal lexical verb ‘suggest’ allows the speaker to avoid making a categorical statement and to negotiate some degree of flexibility for his claims.

2. Salager-Meyer (1993) and Banks (1994) claim that the exclusive association of hedges with evasiveness can obscure some important functions of hedging, and that expressing a lack of certainty does not necessarily show confusion of vagueness. Indeed, one could consider hedges as ways of being more precise in reporting results. Hedging may present the true state of the writers’ understanding and may be used to negotiate an accurate representation of the state of the knowledge under discussion. In fact, academic writers may well wish to reduce the strength of claims simply because stronger statements would not be justified by the experimental data presented. In such cases, researchers are not saying less than what they mean but are rather saying precisely what they mean by not overstating their experimental results. Being too certain can often be unwise. Academics want their readers to know that they do not claim to have the final word on the subject, choosing instead to remain vague in their statements. Hedges then are not a cover-up tactic, but rather a resource used to express some fundamental characteristics of modern science (uncertainty, skepticism and doubt) which reveal the probabilistic nature science started acquiring during the second half of the 19^th century. (During the 17^th and the 18^th centuries and the first half of the 19^th century, science was more deterministic). Moreover, because of the close inter-connection between different scientific fields, no scientist can possibly claim to wholly master the field of knowledge of a given discipline. The seem/suggest combination of the example above could display the speaker’s genuine uncertainty and thus allow him to offer a very precise statement about the extent of his confidence (or lack thereof) in the truth of the propositional information he presented.

3. Myers (1989) argues that hedges are better understood as positive or negative politeness strategies, i.e., as “sophisticated rational strategies” used to mitigate two central positions expressed in scientific writing: to present claims (or findings) pending acceptance by the international scientific community, and to deny claims presented by other researchers. Indeed, to express an opinion is to make a claim and to make a claim is to try to impose one’s opinions on others. For example, in the following double-hedged statement:

Our analyses indicate that higher doses of fish oil can benefit individuals with untreated hypertension.

the authors are presenting a claim to the scientific community while trying to convince their readers of the relevance of their findings. But, in doing so, they remain somewhat vague because they cannot claim to have the final word on the subject. In the social interaction involved in all scientific publishing, hedges permit academics to present their claims while simultaneously presenting themselves as the “humble servants of the scientific community” (Myers, 1984:4). As soon as a claim becomes part of the literature, it is then possible to refer to it without any hedging, as the following example illustrates:

Influenza is the most important viral infection of the respiratory tract.

Thus, as new results/conclusions have to be thoughtfully fit into the existing literature, hedging is not simply a prudent insurance against overstating an assertion, but also a rational interpersonal strategy which both supports the writer’s position and builds writer-reader (speaker-listener) relationships. A hedged comment such as, “I think that perhaps you should have analyzed the benefits these exportation products could have on foreign currency increases,” could reflect a polite and diplomatic disagreement, or it might also display genuine uncertainty on the speaker’s part (definition 2).

4. Banks (1994) argues that a certain degree of hedging has become conventionalized, i.e., that the function of hedges is not necessarily to avoid face-threatening facts (definition 1), but simply to conform to an established writing style. This established style of writing arose as a consequence of the combination of the needs and stimuli mentioned in definitions 1, 2 and 3 above. A totally unhedged style would not be considered seriously by journal editors. Hedges are first and foremost the product of a mental attitude, and decisions about the function of a span of language are bound to be subjective.