332 The subjectivity of utterance

established fact that among the languages of the world there are many that have several non-indicative moods, for different kinds of epistemic modality, but do not have an indicative mood: i.e., they do not have what is traditionally regarded, both by linguists and logicians, as the semantically neutral (or unmarked) mood. It is arguable that this traditional view of what constitutes semantic neutrality is linguistically and cultu­rally prejudiced. At the very least, the fact that there are languages with various non-indicative declarative sentences, but without indicative declarative sentences, reinforces the point made in section 6.6 about the necessity of distinguishing 'declarative' from 'indicative', and more generally of distin­guishing sentence-type (or clause-type) from mood.

Let us now take up briefly the relation between mood and tense. Tense, as we saw in the preceding section, is the category which, in such languages as have tense, results from the gram-maticalization of (incidental) deictic temporal reference. At first sight, it might appear that, since there is no obvious connex­ion between temporal reference and modality, tense and mood are quite distinct grammatical categories. However, as was noted in section 6.6 and mentioned again at the beginning of the present section, in all languages that have both tense and mood, the two categories are, to a greater or less degree, inter­dependent. In fact, it is often difficult to draw a sharp distinc­tion, from a semantic or pragmatic point of view, between tense and mood. Even in English, where tense can be identified with­out much difficulty as a deictic category, there are uses of what are traditionally described as the past, present and future tenses that have more to do with the expression of subjective modality than with primary deixis. For example, in saying

(21) That will be the postman,

speakers are more likely to be making an epistemically qualified statement about the present than an unqualified assertion about the future; in saying

(22) I wanted to ask you whether you needed the car today,

10.5 Modality, modal expressions and mood 333

they are more likely to be making a tentative or hesitant request than to be describing some past state of consciousness. Some of these modal uses of the tenses could perhaps be accounted for in terms of the notion of secondary deixis. But, as I mentioned in section 10.2, secondary deixis and subjective modality are often indistinguishable. Although I will not go into the question in this book, I should mention at this point that there are certain, untraditional and so far non-standard, but empirically well sup­ported, theories of tense according to which, looked at from a more general point of view, tense itself can be seen as being pri­marily a matter of modality. For anyone who does take this view, the facts (i) that mood is more common than tense throughout the languages of the world and (ii) that both cat­egories are in all languages more or less interdependent are only to be expected. Whatever view we take of the relations between tense and mood and between deictic temporal reference and modality, the fact that there are these interdependencies and difficulties of demarcation in practice, casts further doubt upon the applicability of standard systems of tense-logic to the analysis of the semantic structure of all natural languages.

There has been an enormous amount of work done in the last few years, from various points of view, on the analysis of modal­ity in various languages. Among the general questions that have been addressed, one has been mentioned earlier in this sec­tion: given the interdefinability, or duality, of the modal notions of necessity and possibility in formal semantics, which, if either, is more basic than the other in natural languages (and in what sense of 'basic')? Another very similar question is the following: given that there is a distinction to be drawn between objective and subjective modality, what is the relation between them and which, if either, is prior to, or more basic than, the other in nat­ural languages? So far, there is no generally accepted answer to either of these questions. This is hardly surprising. First of all, before they can be properly addressed, it must be established what is meant by 'basic'; and, as we noted in our discussion of lexical meaning and the role that the empiricist notion of osten-sive definition has played in logical semantics, there are at least two senses of 'basic' which might be relevant and which cannot