A structural–functional account of NP-internal mood

Illocutionary force and modality are grammatical phenomena that are traditionally considered to operate at a ‘high level’, scoping over entire clauses and represented in the upper regions of the syntactic tree or of the semantic representation. This is supported by the observation that (most) subordinate clauses do not have their own illocutionary force, but depend on the main clause in this respect. Still, English exhibits a number of constructions where an NP appears to come with its own illocution, independent of the illocutionary force of the clause of which the NP is a part. In other languages as well, NPs are known to occur with illocutionary and modality operators. In this article, several of these constructions will be brought together, and it is then considered how they can be accounted for in two closely related structural–functional syntactic theories, namely Role and Reference Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar. It is shown that both approaches can accommodate these odd constructions, provided a number of minor adjustments are made to the technical apparatus.