Chapter 4 explores mood systems and structures. It concentrates on paradigmatic relations – and the ways in which these can be motivated in the grammars of English, Spanish and Chinese. This chapter foregrounds questions about the nature of functional language typology, when confronted with the diverse structural realisations of mood in three different languages. It highlights the need to focus on system rather than structure, on higher ranks rather than lower ones and ultimately on discourse semantics rather than grammar by way of establishing comparable ground whenever languages are being contrasted and compared.

The notion of ’alternative’ is central to analyses of various semantic/pragmatic phenomena, such as disjunction, focus, discourse structure, questions, and implicature. However, basic questions concerning the various notions of alternatives have not received the attention they deserve, e.g. what exactly these notions signify, or how they are supposed to interact. This chapter reflects on such questions, centering on appeals to alternatives in characterizations of focus, disjunction, discourse goals (questions under discussion), and interrogatives. More precisely, this chapter criticizes the conflation of the set of focus alternatives with the meaning of an interrogative, discusses two conceptions of the alternatives introduced by disjunction (algebraic and attention-based), and departs from the predominant view of QUDs as, essentially, linguistic questions that represent discourse goals.

Speech act constructions bear a close functional relationship to modality and polarity, and also to the information packaging of clauses (Chapters 10–11). Declaratives are associated with the modal category of polarity: declaratives assert or deny the truth of a proposition. Interrogatives (questions, and also responses) are associated with identificational packaging: the information asked about is the focus. They are also associated with epistemic modality: they involve degrees of (un)certainty about an event. Imperative--hortative speech acts are associated with deontic modality: both express a future event that is being at least considered by an agent. Exclamations are associated with the mirative (expression of surprise), which in turn is associated with thetic information packaging. These functional relations between speech act, modality, and clausal information packaging are manifested in the sharing of morphosyntactic strategies between the related categories.

A subordinate clause is one embedded somewhere within another clause. The clause immediately containing it is called its matrix clause and may or may not be the main clause of the whole sentence. Subordinate clauses often differ in their internal structure from main clauses. There are three main types: relative, comparative, and content clauses, the last being the default type.

Relative clauses often include a relative word or a subordinator in marker function and have an anaphoric relation between an element in the clause and one in a containing clause. Often a missing phrase determines the anaphoric relationship. Comparative clauses mostly function as complements to the prepositions ‘than’ or ‘as’ and lack a phrase found in a main declarative clause.

Content clauses may be introduced by a subordinator, such as ‘that’ or ‘whether’, but otherwise differ less radically from main clauses, and indeed are often structurally identical with them. Content clauses function cheifly as complements within the larger construction. Like main clauses, they have declarative, interrogative, and exclamative subtypes. Sometimes, the structure of a subordinate clause is ambiguous between two types.

Here, we look at a number of syntactic differences that are used for different pragmatic purposes, specifically the characteristic but imperfect relations between the following clause types and speech acts: declarative clauses for making statements, closed interrogative clauses for asking closed questions, open interrogative clauses for asking open questions, imperative clauses for issuing commands, and exclamative clauses for uttering exclamations. These relations exist for both main and subordinate clauses.

Declarative clauses are the basic clause type that we’ve been describing so far. Interrogatives have a number of characteristics differences, including subject–auxiliary inversion and the use of interrogative words and fronting of the interrogative phrase in open interrogatives. The exclamatives are always marked by an initial exclamative phrase that begins with either adjective ‘what’ or adverb ‘how’. Imperatives characteristically lack a subject and use the plain form of the verb. We conclude with a brief description of a few minor clause types.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine which features of the three mainEnglish sentence-types make these sentence-types compatible with theperformance of (indirect) speech acts. I am mainly concerned with formalapproaches to indirect communication and I focus on the semantics ofimperatives, the semantics of interrogatives and that of declaratives.

This contribution focuses on the basic features and the linguistic functions of intonation primarily in the standard varieties of Germanic languages including German, Dutch, English, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. It begins with an introduction to intonation generally including a discussion of phonetic and phonological analyses of intonations, the meanings of intonation contours, and the range of data sources used in analyses. It then introduces the commonalities across utterance types in the Germanic languages and then presents the specific features of intonation in each of the languages. Some discussion of dialectal variation is also included. Research into perception – including listener interpretation of intonation contours – is also included.