The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood Oxford Handbooks Series

This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examines the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many facets of the phenomena involved. Parts 1 and 2 of the volume present the basic linguistic facts about the systems of modality and mood in the languages of the world, covering the semantics and the expression of different subtypes of modality and mood respectively. The authors also examine the interaction of modality and mood, mutually and with other semantic categories such as aspect, time, negation, and evidentiality. In Part 3, authors discuss the features of the modality and mood systems in five typologically different language groups, while chapters in Part 4 deal with wider perspectives on modality and mood: diachrony, areality, first language acquisition, and sign language. Finally, Part 5 looks at how modality and mood are handled in different theoretical approaches: formal syntax, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and formal semantics.

Jan Nuyts is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Antwerp. His main research area is cognitive-functional semantics. His current focus of attention concerns the cognitive and functional structure of qualificational categories - and the modal categories in particular - and their linguistic expressions, synchronically and diachronically, and what one can learn from them about human cognition. Johan van der Auwera is Professor of General and English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, and editor-in-chief of the journal Linguistics. His current research focuses on grammatical semantics and typology (including areal typology and dialectology), with special reference to mood, modality, negation, indefinites, and impersonals.