Abstract
The goal of the present paper is to extend the principles of truth-conditional semantics to non-declarative sentence moods.1 My basic hypothesis is that the different syntactic moods should be characterized semantically in terms of their characteristic kind of possible denotation. In the same way as the declarative mood is characterized semantically by the fact that declaratives denote propositions (i.e., functions from points of reference into truth values), I want to characterize the imperative and the interrogative mood by assigning suitable and natural kinds of possible denotations, which are a strictly compositional result of the characteristic syntax defining each mood.
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Hausser, R.R. (1980). Surface Compositionality and the Semantics of Mood. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M. (eds) Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Texts and Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_4
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