Grammatical restraints on the syntactic position for an attributive modifier to encode the realis mood

Abstract

Realis refers to a grammatical mood which indicates that a particular situation is perceived to exist as objective reality; in contrast, irrealis is a subjective mood which refers to a non-existing situation conceptualized through the speaker’s imaginary supposition. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that in some linguistic forms, the modal distinction between realis and irrealis is represented by a different morphological form. This article studies various grammatical conditions and pragmatic restraints on the realization of the irrealis mood in modern Mandarin Chinese. In conclusion, I claim that the pre-noun position for the subject or object attributive modifier functions as one of the syntactic devices that encode the realis/irrealis mood, and that the syntactic position for the object attributive modifier plays an important role in determining the grammatical legitimacy of the irrealis mood of the object attributive modifier.