Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Mood, Modality, and Propositional Attitudes

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.

Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari’s theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.

Anastasia Giannakidou is the Frank J. McLoraine professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Polarity Sensitivity as Nonveridical Dependency and coeditor, inter alia, of Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Alda Mari is CNRS Director of Research at Institut Jean Nicod at Ecole Normale Supérieure, EHESS and PSL, in Paris. She is the author of two books in French and the coeditor of Genericity.