On the relation between verbal mood and sentence mood

The goal of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the relation between two categories associated with the term “mood” in the linguistics literature. These two categories are verbal mood, the category most obviously including indicative and subjunctive, and sentence mood, the one which includes declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Verbal mood and sentence mood are certainly not the same — the first is a traditionally understood as a morphological cateogry, the second as a pragmatic one — but they are closely linked. For example, among languages that make a distinction between indicative and non-indicative verbal moods, declarative sentences typically have to be indicative. In contrast, imperatives are typically not indicative in such languages, and in fact imperative verbs are sometimes classified (within a particular language where this makes sense) as having a separate verbal mood of their own. In such a language, imperative verbal mood marks imperative sentence mood. These points indicate that there is something about either the structure or the semantics of the verbal moods which is relevant to the conversational functions associated with the sentence moods.