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12. Mood Structures
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Chapter 12 Mood Structures 1. Mood Categories Mood categories are a set of categories which typically indicate (a) the syntactic relation of the clause in which the verb occurs to other clauses in the sentence or (b) the attitude of the speaker toward what he is saying. In Macedonian, we have three types of such categories—imperatives, subjunctives, and conditionals. While the imperatives and conditionals exist in all contemporary Slavic languages, the subjunctives are typically Balkan categories that have spread as alternatives to the lost infinitive. 1.1. Both the loss of the infinitives and its replacement by subjunctives represent the most representative and most widely discussed feature of the Balkan Sprachbund languages. It should, however, be pointed out that there is no uniformity in this replacement . The infinitive has been completely lost in Macedonian, Modern Greek, Arli Balkan Romani, and almost completely in Bulgarian, Aromanian, and the southeastern Serbian dialects. In Megleno-Romanian, it shows up in a limited number of structures, while in standard Serbian and standard Croatian, and to some degree in Romanian, many of the uses of the subjunctives are shared by infinitives. As for Albanian , it is not quite clear whether the Indo-European infinitive was lost at one point and reinstituted (with devices that are distinct from the common Indo-European devices) prior to the publication of the first Albanian written document—Buzuku’s Missal, published in 1555, or else the Albanian quasi-infinitival structures are not related to infinitives at all (cf. Demiraj 1969: 89; Joseph 1983). 1.2. According to Joseph (1983) the loss of the infinitive in Macedonian and Bulgarian was influenced by Greek. Mirčev (1937: 22), however, points out that some of the clauses with infinitives in the Greek Bible were translated into Old Church Slavonic by finite clauses introduced by the complementizer da, which shows that the uses of the infinitive and the subjunctive in Greek and Old Church Slavonic differed. Yet, one has to bear in mind that the uses of the infinitive and the subjunctive in Old Church Slavonic were not clearly differentiated. In the early translations of the Bible into Old Church Slavonic (10th and 11th century), clauses with infinitives are used 340 A GRAMMAR OF MACEDONIAN alongside clauses introduced by the subordinator da ‘that’.1 Subsequently, in the Balkan Slavic spoken in the areas in which at the present Bulgarian and Macedonian are spoken, the infinitive lost its infinitival suffix and appeared in a ‘short form’ (Asenova 2002: 143). From the 16th century onwards, in the South Slavic spoken to the south and east of the Serbian river Timok, the infinitive appeared productively only in clauses expressing futurity, from which it has subsequently also been ousted by subjunctives. 1.3. Currently, in Balkan Slavic, the ‘short infinitive’ occurs in the formation of the future tense of some standard Serbian verbs and in standard and dialectal Bulgarian clauses expressing prohibition. In Macedonian, the infinitives have been completely lost. Some of their functions are performed by verbal nouns or gerunds with the suffix -nje,2 but most of them are replaced by clauses introduced by subordinators. 1.3.1. Indicative subordinate clauses are introduced by ‘that’ complementizers. 1.3.1.1. The most frequent Macedonian ‘that’-complementizers are deka and oti, the latter complementizer being borrowed from Greek:3 1 Krapova (2001: 109) notes that the first Old Church Slavonic clauses with subjunctives were clauses with distinct subjects, such as (i), and clauses with exceptional case marking (ECM), such as (ii): (i) Ašte hoštov da tъ prebovdetъ… if want.1Sg Subjun.Mark he remain.3Sg ‘If I want him to remain…’ (ii) Ne hoštemъ semu da caruetъ nadъ nami. not want.1Pl him Subjun.Mark rule.3Sg above us ‘We don’t want him to govern us.’ As pointed out by Asenova (2002: 198), when the modality of the complement cannot be deduced from the modality of the main clause, a finite complement is more desirable. In fact, the infinitive might have disappeared in the Balkan Slavic languages even without the disappearance of the infinitive in Greek: the need for speakers of different languages to communicate with each other required transparency and finite clauses are more transparent than infinitives. 2 Examples of verbal nouns performing functions analogous to those of former infinitives are given in (i–ii): (i) Gravot saka dolgo vrienje. beans+the.M.Sg want.3Sg long boiling ‘The beans need to be boiled long.’ (lit. ‘The beans want long boiling...