Re: Irrealis mood and non-finite verbs

Ignore point (2), I wasn't sure enough to include it but forgot to
delete it.
> There is a book by D. N. S. Bhat called "The Prominence of Tense,
> Aspect, and Mood". What the book claims is essentially that many
> (most?) languages can be characterised as tense prominent, mood
> prominent, or aspect prominent based on how obligatory and pervasive
> the distinctions are. The author does allow for languages which are
> not clearly any of the three, and admits that it is more a matter of
> degree than a discrete classification, but he does claim that it's
> still useful to classify many languages as being one of the three, and
> that there are typology correlates of being tense, aspect, or mood
> prominent.
>
> Anyway, this is actually going sometimes vaguely relevant to your
> post. He also claims that many grammars written by Western (mostly
> English speaking) linguists have a bias to interpret TAM distinctions
> in terms of tense (and perhaps aspect). He argues that most languages
> claimed to show a future vs non-future contrast in fact probably have
> a realis vs irrealis contrast, and that so called "future" forms in
> many of these languages can also be found in many irrealis, but
> clearly not future, contexts (e.g. past wishes).
>
> (2) One of the typological correlates of mood prominence is a tendency to
>>
>> Where it exists, the distinction is shown by different prefixes
>> and/or subject-markers on the verb. One language in another group
>> (Mori), interestingly, shows it by using different forms of the
>> subject pronouns, though I've seen that analyzed as simply a
>> present/past vs. future distinction.
>>
>> My impression from some of the old (1930s) grammars of these and
>> related languages, is that "realis/irrealis" kind-of gets short
>> shrift, as if maybe the analysts weren't really too clear as to what
>> is was all about ;-(((((  I may be doing S.J.Esser (who wrote an
>> extensive 2-vol. grammar of Mori) an injustice, however, as it was a
>> quite a while ago that I read him. He also wrote brief grammars of
>> the languages (or relatives) mentioned by van den Berg.
>>
>