Mood and modality in Northern Sotho

Abstract

A distinction is drawn between the concepts ‘mood' and modality’, and existing views regarding the modal system of Northern Sotho are reconsidered against this background. It is shown that whereas the concept ‘mood’ can be defined in terms of verbal inflection, ‘modality’ is a semantic notion which should not be associated with the verb alone, but with the utterance as a whole. A distinction is also drawn between deontic modality and epistemic modality, and the implications this distinction has for the description of the modal system of Northern Sotho are investigated.