The notion of mood reexamined, against the background of modality

Though mood and modality are usually mentioned in close conjunction, as one research domain, the notion of modality has recently become increasingly prominent at the expense of mood. Yet the notion of mood, mostly restricted to the realis-irrealis distinction, has not been discarded. In this article an attempt is made to understand the enduring viability of the notion of mood by looking at the features prototypically associated with it. These features are partly formal, as mood is mainly associated with infl ectional exponence, but also partly semantic, as formations diverging from prototypically inflectional mood tend to be classifi ed with mood to the extent that they refl ect the more abstract semantic features associated with the realis-irrealis distinction. In the fi nal part of the article the question of the relationship between mood and modality is once more addressed.