Head nouns as modal stance markers -academic texts vs. legal texts

Issa Kanté * abstract

The aim of this paper is to substantiate on the one hand that head nouns are modal expressions allowing the writer to mark her stance in the text. On the other hand, it shows that the purpose and the social role of a text can be perceived in both its lexical expressions and grammatical patterns. Thus, this paper, which is a corpus-based study, shows that the use and the frequency of head nouns are distributed along text genres.

The paper also agues that head nouns and that-clauses in which they appear may not have the same communicative functions and effects according to text genres, which is to say that the same head noun or that-clause may not have the same discursive functions or effects in two genres of text. The contrast between legal and academic corpora has enabled us to substantiate these claims.

résumé Cet article a pour objectif de montrer d'une part que les noms recteurs sont des expressions modales qui marquent la présence de l'auteur dans le texte. D'autre part, il montre que le but discursif et le rôle social d'un texte est perceptible dans ses structures lexicales et grammaticales. Axée sur le discours académique et juridique, l'étude révèle en effet que l'emploi et la fréquence des noms recteurs peuvent être corrélés aux genres de discours. Elle montre également qu'un même nom recteur ou un même type de complétive en that employé dans deux genres de textes n'aurait pas les mêmes fonctions ou effets discursifs.

Aims of the study

This paper 1 is a corpus-based study investigating the presence writers or speakers in their discourse through certain types of head nouns, such as fact, statement, assumption, etc. These nouns, contrary to many others, have the particularity to govern complement that-clauses, such as in:

In this way, if the highest ranked speakers can be correlated across verbal paradigms, the assumption that rank order scales can be correlated across environments is validated. (JEL 2 )

Previous linguistic works, using different approaches, have categorized these nouns (called "head nouns", complement "that-taking nouns", or "shell nouns") in lexical classes and subclasses [START_REF] Nomura | The Semantics of the Content Clause Construction in English[END_REF][START_REF] Schmid | English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition[END_REF][START_REF] Cortes | Shell nouns as cohesive devices in published and ESL student writing[END_REF]. Some authors like [START_REF] Svartvik | A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language[END_REF]Quirk et al. ( , p. 1231Quirk et al. ( , pp. 1260-1) -1) and Huddleston et al. (2002, p. 965) claim that the ability of these nouns to govern a that-clause is justified by either their abstractness, or by their semantic relation to verbs or adjectives from which they are. These accounts might not be fully satisfactory since neither all the head nouns are abstract (sign, picture, etc.), nor all of them are derived from verbs or adjectives (fact, idea, etc.) Ballier (2004a).

Other typological approaches, Perkins (1983, pp. 86-8) and [START_REF] Chevalier | La subordination nominale : classes, sous-classes et types sémantiques[END_REF] for instance, have shown that modality is one of the main semantic features of such nouns. Put another way, nouns that govern complement that-clauses are nominalized expressions of modality; viz. they are used by the speaker to convey a modal characterization. Based on this analysis, we contrast a legal and an academic text to show how these kinds of nominal expressions are used by the writer or speaker to mark her own stance. Another aim of this study is to figure out if the functions of a head noun or a particular that-clause change according to text genres. In other words: Do the communicative functions of a head noun and the pattern in which it appears vary from a genre of text to another?

Corpora

The linguistic corpus

It is composed of 16 research papers published from 2000 to 2007, written by both non-native and native speakers of English. All of the papers (including three book reviews and one interview) were retrieved from the website 3 of the Journal of English Linguistics. The corpus contains around 100,000 words.

The legal corpus

Our legal corpus is an extract from an online corpus, Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1834, which contains 25 million words 4 , and Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court (70 million words of text), extending the period covered to 1913 5 . The corpus is made up of transcribed and marked up texts of felony trial reports published in the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913. That is to say that our legal corpus is the transcription of courtroom interactions and reports. Thus, compared to the linguistic corpus, which is an academic genre, the legal one is rather a professional genre.

In order to have two corpora of equal size, we retrieved from the last part of the Old Bailey Proceedings corpus (January and February 1913) an equivalent of 100,000 words. Notice that we are aware of the diachronic and stylistic differences between our two corpora. For instance, the dimension of reported speech is much more important in the legal text than in the linguistic one.

A contrastive standpoint

Our interest to compare an academic text with a legal text is motivated by two main reasons. The first is to show if the source of modality and its extra-linguistic goals are determinant in text specificity. Head nouns that complement that-clauses are not used only for the lexical semantic meaning they convey, but also for a calculated and particular modal meaning. So, the clear-cut distinction between the legal genre (interactions in courtroom) and the academic genre (a somewhat one-way discourse, in the case of research papers) is a sound ground for substantiating discursive and contextual differences in terms of modal characterizations and their implications in the real world. The differences (linguistic to extra-linguistic dimensions) between a legal and an academic text may be displayed in the choice and frequency of head nouns.

The second reason is to understand if text genre differences are neutralized when the speaker uses nominal that-clauses in her discourse. The questions are: Does the speaker in the academic genre and in the courtroom one use that-clauses for the same communicative functions and effects? Do the differences in terms of social role between texts necessarily mean differences in communicative functions and effects? The analysis of corpora from two highly distinctive genres seems to be a good strategy to answer such questions.

Hypotheses

Our working hypotheses are the following:

-head nouns are modal expressions used by the speaker / writer to mark her stance towards a proposition [START_REF] Ballier | La grammaticalisation des contenus discursifs dans les complétives nominales[END_REF], an event or a state;

-the use of a head noun in a given grammatical pattern in two genres of text may not have the same purpose or implication. For example, the epistemic noun evidence in a given complement that-clause may not have either the same purpose or the same implication in a legal and in an academic text;

-the social role of a discursive genre may also be displayed in the lexical expressions of its texts. For instance, the authoritative role of the legal institution may be noticed in the use of certain deontic nominal expressions and their immediate syntagmatic environment. Similarly, the persuasive and argumentative aim of linguistic papers may be exhibited in the frequency of certain epistemic expressions.

Data analysis

I. Lexico-grammatical patterns and their functions

The lexico-grammatical patterns in which we are interested here are the following: [N that], [Presentative N that], [N be that]. In addition to these three patterns there are other cases where the head noun collocates with either a verb to govern a that-clause (Figure 3 makes the point that in the sixteenth century, the process away from multiple negation was particularly favored by men … JEL), or with a preposition (in the sense / on the basis that …).

I.1. Simple N complement clause [N that-clause]

( This construction can be considered the prototype of complement that-clauses since the head noun alone governs the subordinate clause. The semantic function of this construction is to express the speaker's stance towards a proposition, an event, or a state which has already been expressed mentally or verbally. In other words, this complement clause is a sort of indirect modal expression on an already expressed proposition, a previously noticed event or state. In (1) for example, the speaker (Max Alexander) asserts that what another person (Edith Ann Waghorn) said is not true. Through the head noun, the speaker 'wraps' the propositional content in a characterizing noun (statement), and then expresses a personal judgment (… is a lie …) about it. Thus the subordinate clause, characterized by the head noun, is in fact a kind of reported speech. In example (1), we can clearly see that the that-clause refers back to, or even reports a speech that has been expressed earlier in the text. The speaker does not limit himself to just a report, but characterize 6. Old Bailey Proceedings (legal corpus).

the proposition and gives his personal opinion about its content. Hence Biber et al. 's (1999, p. 648) claim that "the that-clause reports a proposition, while the head noun reports the author's stance towards that proposition." The same mechanism happens in (2); the writer creates a modal characterization and marks her personal stance about an already expressed position. The characterization Ariel's general assumption shows that the writer refers to a preconstruction, not necessarily in her own text, but in someone else's analyses (Ariel's).

Thus, in terms of text specificity, the semantic function of [N that] seems to be the same in the courtroom text (1) and in the linguistic paper (2). The aim of the speaker in using a head noun is to mark a personal stance towards a proposition; which is to say that the use of this grammatical pattern, as such, has no particularizing function in terms of text specificity.

However, the choice of nominal expressions may depend on the personal commitment of the speaker towards the proposition or on the way the proposition was expressed. Therefore, the speaker in (2) could characterize Ariel's position as Ariel's hypothesis, conclusion, or claim according to how she personally perceives it or upon the way Ariel expressed it. And in (1), the speaker in the courtroom, instead of using statement could use accusation, allegation or declaration depending on the way she perceives the proposition. It is also important to point out the difference in discursive strategies between the two examples. In (1), the testimonial source is not mentioned, whereas in (2) it is explicit, Ariel's.

These observations show that the choice of a head noun in a simple noun that-clause depends on the speaker's personal perception of the proposition she wants to characterize. We can then conclude that the use of this grammatical pattern in the discourse is motivated by the need to express one's own commitment towards a preconstruction. For instance, when the speaker says (the fact that …), she wants to show the degree of her epistemic commitment about an observed event or state. And when she says (the order / requirement that), she obviously wants to show the deontic aspect of a preconstructed proposition or event. Indeed, that-clause as singularly a preconstruction is one of the differences between [N that] and [There be N that].

Presentative that noun complement: [ There be N that-clause]

(3) Judge Lumley Smith said there was no evidence that up to July 31

Hart had taken any part in the matter. He therefore ruled that there was no case to go to the jury as against Hart. Verdict (Hart), not guilty. (OBP)

(4) Labov (1978, p. 13), for example, claims that "there is ample evidence that human linguistic competence includes quantitative constraints as well as discrete ones." (JEL)

These two examples illustrate another type of lexico-grammatical pattern in which a noun governs a complement that-clause. Contrary to (1 and 2), the head noun in these utterances follows a 'presentativeexistential' structure, which constitutes the main clause. This formal difference between [N that] and [There be N that] is underpinned by a functional one. In both patterns, the main clause expresses the degree of the speaker's commitment. As in utterances (1 and 2), the speaker in (3 and 4) characterizes and expresses her personal commitment (there was no evidence / there is ample evidence) towards the proposition. Nonetheless, there is a subtle difference between (1/2) and (3/4), since in the former, the assertion (main clause) is about the speaker's judgment on the propositional content; whereas in the latter, it is about the existence of the propositional content. This difference can be summed up as in the table 1: We can notice that the distinction in grammatical patterns correlates with a semantic difference. In both [N that] and [Presentative N that] there is a nominal characterization of the propositional content. But contrary to the former, the speaker in using [There be N that] does not express a personal judgment about the proposition. In presentative that-clauses, the speaker asserts the proposition "as actually existing independently of the speaker" Perkins (1983, p. 67), i.e. the proposition is presented as "true for any speaker", and the speaker does not give any personal comment. Notice however that the testimonial source of the modal expression can be explicitly stated (there was evidence for the jury that … OBP).

It is also worth noting that the speaker uses other devices to express the degree of her commitment about the propositional content. In (3 and 4), we can remark that in the main clauses the speaker uses devices such as negation (no evidence …) or an adjective (ample evidence …) to reinforce the degree of her commitment; a commitment whose modality type is determined by the head noun. In the utterances, the noun evidence conveys an epistemic characterization. And the type of modal expression could for example be deontic as in:

(5) On August 14 there was an Admiralty order that this man's name should be removed from the Navy List. (OBP)

In this utterance, the speaker reports on the existence of a proposition (that this man's name …), which is deontic in nature (Admiralty order) and whose source is explicit. Thus, one can conclude that the source of modality can be mentioned in most that noun complement constructions; which is also the case in predicative that noun complement clauses, discussed below.

Predicative that noun complement: [N -be that-clause]

(6) Dr. FORWOOD, medical officer, Holloway Prison. I have had the prisoner under observation since December 7. My conclusion is that at the time of committing this act she was not responsible for her actions. Verdict, Guilty, but insane at the time of commission of the offence.

(OBP)

(7) The implication of these findings is that the process was diffused from above in the sense that it was promoted by professional usage.

(JEL)

These utterances involve a nominal characterization of the propositional content. In both sentences, instead of a simple declarative utterance (6' and 7'), the speaker uses a sort of indirect assertion -"mode indirect" (Colletta, 1994, p. 89) in enveloping the propositional content in a nominal expression.

(6') At the time of committing this act she was not responsible for her actions.

(7') The process was diffused from above …

The nominal expressions (conclusion and implication), which constitute a kind of epistemic shell denote the speaker's commitment towards the propositional content, [START_REF] Schmid | English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition[END_REF]. In (6), the degree of the speaker's commitment is conveyed by the term conclusion, the modal epistemic source of which is the speaker herself, My (Dr. Forwood). And in (7), the epistemic source is the findings; the speaker's commitment is measured by the epistemic noun implication. Thus, the propositional contents of (6 and 7) are both characterized by conclusion and implication respectively. To sum up, one can state that subject predicative that-construction is a process in which the speaker uses a noun as a modal shell to express a personal stance towards what she is asserting. In these constructions, there is an identification or description process between the head noun and the propositional content.

Note that although the head nouns in both utterances are epistemic, they do not have the same purpose or interpretation. In the courtroom situation, the choice of the epistemic expression has a precise purpose and effect on the verdict (guilty or not guilty); whereas in the academic writing context, the purpose and effect are to convince and have the adherence of the reader. So, these differences in purposes and effects may be crucial for the choice of the modal nominal. That is to say that the use of such or such modal nominal, as a stance marker, in such or such context may depend not only on the degree of the personal commitment towards the proposition, but first and foremost on the extralinguistic purposes of the utterance or of the overall writing-speaking context. For example a judge would probably use (There is no evidence that) instead of (My impression is that) when he / she delivers the verdict. Similarly a linguist would be reluctant to use impression in an utterance like (A first observation […] is that the metalinguistic labels respondents volunteered were frequently the same. JEL) This is in line with Biber et al. (1999, p. 649) who point out that in an academic writing observation as a head noun (over 10 times per million words) is twice more frequent than impression (over 5 times per million words).

Furthermore, the use of the term conclusion by a medical expert in a courtroom is not at all the same as the use of the same term by a researcher in an academic paper. Pragmatically, it is even somehow obligatory (or at least customary) for the medical expert in a courtroom to use the term conclusion in an utterance like (6); whereas the linguist in (7) could use conclusion, inference, result, etc. As a matter of fact, conclusion is used three times in the legal corpus, and in all the uses by a medical expert. This means that the choice of a head noun in a given text is not necessarily oriented by its lexical semantic meaning, but rather by the targeted pragmatic function and effect.

II. Discussion

Data analysis has revealed that the overall use of that noun complement clauses is much more frequent in an academic research paper than in a courtroom discourse. So, this confirms Biber et al. 's (1999, p. 648) observation that "that-clauses functioning as noun complements are one of the primary devices used to mark stance in academic prose." The table below illustrates this contrast.

Noun complement clauses

Courtroom corpus 44 occurrences, 28%

Linguistic corpus 115 occurrences, 72%

[(V) N that] 3 (7%) 52 (45%) [Presentative-existential N that]
13 (30%) (8 There be that / 5 It be N that)

12 (10.50%) (7 There be that / 5 It be N that)

[N be that] 14 (32%) 25 (22%)

[Support-V N that] 9 (20%) 12 (10.50%)

[PP N that]. 5 (11%) (with intent that) 10 (8.50%) (in the sense that)

[N be N that] -4 (3.50%) (a particularly valuable feature of chapter 3 is the fact that)

Table 2. -Types of that-noun complement clauses in the corpora.

One can observe in the table that the linguistic corpus contains nearly three times more complement that-clauses (72%) than the courtroom corpus (28%). This may be related to the fact that one is much more likely to comment on preconstructions (for instance previous works or ideas on the topic one discusses) in a research paper than in a courtroom. The researcher, in her analysis of facts, ideas, or findings would inevitably have to discuss, characterize and comment on other researchers' works and ideas. That is probably why she often must recourse to head nouns in order to carry out those necessary characterizations and assessments. Biber et al. 's (1999, pp. 648-9) illustration of the most common head nouns in academic prose supports this claim.

In the sections below, we firstly discuss some observations to prove the claim that head nouns are used as modal stance marker. Then we analyze if head nouns as modal devices and the grammatical patterns in which they appear are used to achieve specific text purposes. And finally we tackle the issue of text institutional functions and particular lexical usage.

II.1. Head nouns as modal stance markers

The confrontation of our two corpora confirms that head nouns are actually used by the speaker to express a personal modal assessment and characterization of the propositional content. As modal expressions, the head nouns we found in the corpora belong to the following modal classes: Epistemic nouns are used by the speaker to express "an assessment of the certainty of the proposition [… and] an indication of the source of the knowledge expressed in the that-clause." (Biber et al., 1999, p. 648.) Notice that 14 of the epistemic head nouns in our linguistic corpus are among the nouns that Biber et al. have identified as the "23 most common head nouns" in the academic genre (Biber et al., 1999, p. 648).

As for the deontic class, in addition to the semantic meaning of the head noun, the form of the verb in the that-clause highlights the deontic implication. All the deontic head nouns in the legal corpus are noticeably followed by either a putative should or by other modal auxiliaries like must, have to, would or shall. When we look at the occurrences, we can observe that the use of should or the other modal auxiliaries is triggered by the head noun. Examples (8 and 9) illustrate the deontic implication of the head nouns, but also that of the verb forms in the subordinate clauses. In these utterances, one can notice that there is a strong deontic relationship between the head nouns (rule and orders) and the deontic auxiliaries (must and should).

Another type of head noun, which occurs exclusively in our linguistic corpus, is the 'attitudinal-evaluative' nouns. Similar to the other kinds of head nouns, attitudinal-evaluative nominals are also used by the speaker to characterize the propositional content. However, instead of characterizing the proposition in terms of commitment, these kinds of modal nouns are rather used by the speaker to express positive, negative or neutral assessments about a proposition, an event or a state. In the examples below, one can notice that the writer uses the head nouns (advantage, flaw, and part) to convey attitudinal-evaluative characterization, which are respectively positive, negative and neutral. Notice that except hope and wisdom all the attitudinal-evaluative head nouns in the corpus are used in the predicative that-clause pattern. This may be explained by the identifying and interpretative functions of this grammatical pattern. The hypothesis is that attitudinal-evaluative expressions lend themselves more easily to the identifying and interpretative role of subject predicative rather than to the adjacent characterization of simple or presentative that-noun clauses.

II.2. Nominal modal expressions and textual strategies

Throughout the data analysis, we have noticed that the different grammatical patterns of noun that-clauses may not have the same communicative functions and effects according to text genres.

For instance the presentative that-clause has different pragmatic purposes and effects in linguistic and courtroom corpora. In the courtroom, when the judge says "there was no evidence that …", on the one hand she aims at showing the degree of her commitment towards the propositional content. But on the other hand, the main purpose of this modal shell is to claim or announce the discharge of the defendant. Pragmatically, the utterance implies that the defendant is not guilty. Whereas on the contrary, in the academic writing context, when the speaker says "there is ample evidence that …" she of course shows the degree of her commitment, but does not seek any extra-linguistic effect other than convincing the reader.

Likewise, in (I.3), we have shown that the extra-linguistic purpose of a modal expression in a predicative that-clause can depend on the contextual genre of the text. The remarkable absence of attitudinalevaluative expressions in the courtroom text may plead in favor of this claim. Speakers in a courtroom may willingly avoid using expressions that convey positive or negative judgments on what they or others say. The same hypothesis might explain the scarcity of [N that] constructions in the courtroom text (only 3 occurrences). Bearing in remind that the main particularity of this construction is that, in addition to the modal nominal characterization, the speaker expresses a personal judgment about the propositional content.

II.3. Lexical expressions and the institutional role of texts

Based on corpus statistics, one can assume that the social role of a text may be perceived in the use and frequency of lexical items. In other words, the frequency of certain modal expressions seems to be related to the genre of text. Thus, if we take for granted the statistics, we can conclude that the authoritative role of the legal institution is noticeable in the lexical modal devices of its text. For instance, the legal text, which contains three times less that noun complement clauses (28% versus 72% in the linguistic corpus) has seven times more deontic head nouns than the latter. In fact, the linguistic corpus does not contain any deontic nouns, whereas the legal one contains seven: (order, regulations, rule, word of honour, arrangement, condition, intent). Can we relate this to the authoritative role of the institution? And interestingly, the high frequency of epistemic nouns in the linguistic corpus (36 head nouns out of 49) may have something to do with its persuasive and nonauthoritative function.

Conclusion

In this study, we have shown on the one hand that nouns used to govern complement that-clauses involve modality, and lend themselves to a modal classification. Thus, via different that-clause patterns, the speaker can express a personal position on the propositional content [N that], point out the existence of a proposition [Presentative N that], or present the proposition as an identification of the head noun [N be that]. Nevertheless, the essence of all of the three patterns is to modally characterize the propositional content.

On the other hand, we have tried to understand how text genres and purposes are construed through head nouns. The analysis has firstly revealed that head noun types and frequency are proportional to text genres. Secondly, it has shown that same heads nouns or that-clauses may not have the same discursive functions or effect in two genres of text; which is to say that that-clauses have different pragmatic interpretations with respect to text purposes or social role.

Finally, we have to add that large contrastive studies should be carried out to see to what extent the use of modal expressions in general and nominal ones in particular is correlated to text genres. Such studies would provide keys to understanding text specificity and purposes in relation to modality.

( 8 )

 8 The rule with regard to drivers' licenses is that applicants must produce satisfactory evidence of good conduct and sobriety during the past three years. (OBP) (9) I forwarded the report to the Commander-in-Chief and orders were given that an investigation should be held. (OBP)

Table 1

 1

	Clauses	[N that]	[Presentative N that]
	Main clause	Nominal characterization	Nominal characterization
	(Direct	+ personal judgment about	+ assertion the existence of
	assertion)	the propositional content.	the propositional content.
		Ex.: The statement (that …)	Ex.: There was no evidence
		is a lie in the legal sense	(that …)
	That-clause	Propositional content	Propositional content

. -Semantic differences between [N that] and [There be N that].

Table 3 .

 3 -Modal classification of head nouns and their frequency. 7 7. Head nouns in bold are the ones that occur in both corpora.

  … the historical part of the argument is that since Old English did not have articles, syntactic analyses that depend on them are inadequate.(JEL)

	(10) The great advantage of this corpus is that it contains entire texts
	rather than extracts. (JEL)

(11) The obvious flaw in this otherwise attractive explanation is that there is nothing to suggest that Westerners outnumber speakers of other dialects in the migrant population. (JEL)

(12)

/projects/projectpages/centralcriminalcourt.html>.


Issa Kanté

Mood and modality in finite noun complement clauses A French-English contrastive study*

Keywords: modality, modal noun, mandative subjunctive, that-clause, head noun, contrastive analysis

The present paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of modality in English and French finite noun complement clauses. On the one hand, we claim on the basis of cross-linguistic and semantic evidence that modality is a common intrinsic feature of nouns that license that/que complement clauses, and, as a consequence, that head nouns are modal stance markers. On the other hand, this paper shows that indicative-subjunctive alternation in that/que noun complement clauses is determined by the modality type of the governing noun. Contrastive analysis of French and English provides evidence to substantiate these claims.

Introduction

This paper is a corpus-based study investigating the lexico-semantic relation between that/que noun complement clauses and modality. The link between thatclauses and modality has been widely described in the literature, but the source of modality has not been fully identified. The types of clauses focused on in this study are illustrated in the examples (1)-(4) below:

(1) The certainty that the abnormality of this relationship with Johnny could do her harm was, for a fraction of a second, clear and undisputed in her mind.

(BYU-BNC)

(2) These findings support the hypothesis that autonomic neuropathy affects motility throughout the gastrointestinal tract.

(BYU-BNC)

(3) J' étais bien décidé à ne pas souffler mot de mon histoire; mais la certitude que ma mère allait me demander des éclaircissements ne laissait pas de m' exaspérer.

(Frantext ) "I was determined not to whisper a word of my story; but the certainty that my mother would ask for clarifications irritated me. " (My translation)

(4) Nous pouvons faire l'importante remarque que la double démonstration que nous venons de donner s' appuie uniquement sur l'hypothèse que les particules ont une trajectoire et que l' équation de continuité est valable.

(Frantext ) "We can point out that the double demonstration we have done is based solely on the hypothesis that the particles have a trajectory and that the continuity equation is valid. "

(My translation)

Our starting point was the observation that a noun like linguistics cannot govern a complement that-clause (example 5), whereas one like hypothesis can (example 2):

(5) *These findings support (the) linguistics that autonomic neuropathy affects motility throughout the gastrointestinal tract.

Therefore, the first part of this paper (Section 3) investigates whether the nonmodal value [-modality] of the term linguistics and the modal (epistemic) value [+modality] of hypothesis/evidence can explain why the former cannot govern that-clauses whereas the latter can. Previous linguistic studies have shown that such that/que-clauses, through the head noun, do involve modality (cf. [START_REF] Perkins | Modal Expressions in English[END_REF][START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF][START_REF] Biber | Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English[END_REF][START_REF] Mélis | Nominalisateurs et prise en charge[END_REF]Ballier 2007 & [forthcoming] for English, Chevalier & Léard 1996 for French).

The second part of our study (Section 4) explores how mood selection in a subordinate clause is influenced by the head noun, and how the choice of a particular mood affects the overall modal meaning of the construction (cf. [START_REF] Lyons | Semantics[END_REF]Lyons : 848, 1995: 255;: 255;Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 172;Riegel et al. 1994: 287). Particularly in French, mood alternation (indicative or subjunctive) is used as a 'modality orientation' marker in complement clauses. 1 As Riegel et al. (1994: 287) note, mood is defined as the category which expresses the speaker's attitude towards his/her utterance. It can be hypothesized that the indicative/subjunctive alternation in that/ que complement clauses is correlated to the modal class of the governing head noun.

All of the hypotheses in this paper are tested using French and English monolingual corpora (cf. Section 2). These provide authentic utterances from each language to substantiate our claims about the modality of head nouns in Section 3, and will enable us to statistically investigate whether the distribution of mood after head nouns is dependent on the nouns' modality class.

Corpora

Authentic occurrences were selected from two monolingual corpora of French and English, viz. Frantext and Brigham Young University British National Corpus (BYU-BNC). Frantext is a 210-million word corpus (4,000 texts), including literary (80%) as well as scientific and technical texts (20%). 2 The corpus spans five centuries (16th to 21st), but the search was limited to the 20th century. The BYU-BNC (1980s to 1993), an interface designed by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, consists of 100 million words and is composed of texts from fiction, popular magazines, academic discourse and newspapers; the spoken part was ignored in this study.

Instead of extracting all that/que-clauses from these two corpora, we decided to focus only on that/que-clauses which are governed by one of the following head nouns, which are assumed to be prototypical representatives of the three modality types epistemic, deontic and alethic: assertion, certainty, fact and hypothesis for English, affirmation, certitude, fait and hypothèse for French (epistemic nouns); constraint, demand, request and requirement for English, contrainte, demande, exigence and obligation for French (deontic nouns); likelihood, necessity, possibility and probability for English, vraisemblance, nécessité, possibilité and probabilité for French (alethic nouns; this term and others are defined in Section 3.3). 3 The selection and modal classification of these nouns were mainly based on the studies of Perkins (1983: 86-87), Chevalier & Léard (1996: 55), Biber et al. (1999: 647-648) and Ballier (2007: 69-70). These authors describe head nouns as involving modality and argue that they could be classified into modal classes (see Sections 3.1 and 3.2 for arguments). 4 From the BYU-BNC and Frantext corpora, we extracted all that/que-clauses that are adjacent to one of the selected head nouns: [(V/Prep) the N that-clause] and [(V/Prep) le, la, l' N que-clause]. For both English and French, pre-predicate that-clauses (examples 6 and 7) and non-complement that-clauses, such as relative clauses [the N that Rel.] (example 8), were excluded: (6) That Saints managed to cause an upset with nothing more than direct running and honest endeavour bodes well for Great Britain (cf. Biber et al. 1999: 676) (7) Que le vieil Horace est le personnage principal de la tragédie, c' est la vérité (Soutet 2000: 50) "That old Horace is the main character of the tragedy, is the truth. "

(My translation) (8) The hypothesis that can explain bat navigation is a good candidate for explaining anything in the world.

Additionally, when a head noun was followed by two that/que-clauses, only the first was included in the data. In example (9), for instance, only que je choisisse à l' avance mes textes was included in the results.

(9) Les points de repère pourraient d' ailleurs être déterminés par le fait que je choisisse à l' avance mes textes et que je les relie par mes commentaires.

(Frantext)

"In fact, the bench marks could be determined by the fact that I choose in advance my texts and that I connect them by comments. " (My translation)

The corpus query in BYU-BNC yielded 779 that-clause occurrences: 319 epistemic, 302 alethic and 158 deontic noun that-clauses. For French, the data include 327 nominal que-clauses governed by epistemic nouns, 39 governed by alethic nouns and 4 governed by deontic nouns -a total of 370 occurrences. Note that in Frantext, the searches for deontic exigence and obligation yielded a very limited set of occurrences: three occurrences for the former and one for the latter. As for contrainte, demande and alethic vraisemblance there were no occurrences at all of que-clauses.

As we had only four complement clauses governed by deontic nouns, we extracted data from another corpus, in order to complement the data set. WebCorp Linguist's Search Engine was used to retrieve que-clauses governed by these nouns. WebCorp LSE is a "tailored linguistic search engine for accessing the web as corpus" created by the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) at Birmingham City University. 5 The test corpus consists of 70 million words from web-extracted texts. WebCorp LSE yielded 10 occurrences of que-clauses governed by vraisemblance and 30 governed by the deontic nouns exigence, obligation, contrainte and demande. When added to the occurrences from Frantext, the additional data brought the total to 410 que-clauses.

From a contrastive and methodological standpoint, it must be acknowledged that there are stylistic and genre differences between the French and English data. The best contrastive method would have been to compare two corpora that were built on the same sampling techniques and had an equal size. On the one hand, the BNC and Frantext have not the same size and on the other hand, they neither cover the same time period nor contain equally the same genre of texts. However, these differences are unlikely to have any significant negative impact on our analyses, since the main purpose of the statistics is not to demonstrate that the uses of the subjunctive or the indicative in French and in English are proportionally comparable, but to show that, in each language, the proportion of their usage is related to the modality type of the head noun.

Head nouns as modality markers

Theoretical background

One of the main constraints in that noun complement clauses is head noun selection. The question is obviously why a that-clause can be governed by certain nouns but not by others. A consensus seems to exist on the interpretation of the finite noun complement, but not on the issue of head noun selection constraints. Biber et al. (1999: 648) and Mélis (2002: 141-145), among others, claim that head nouns or/and their complement that-clauses are used by speakers to express their stance or attitude towards the propositional content (cf. [START_REF] Perkins | Modal Expressions in English[END_REF][START_REF] Ballier | La complétive du nom dans le discours des linguistes[END_REF] for English, Chevalier & Léard 1996 for French). Biber et al. (1999: 648) observe that "the that clause reports a proposition, while the head noun reports the author's stance towards that proposition". Ballier (2007: 69) describes the function of (epistemic) head nouns as a testimonial cursor which enables the speaker to express his/her stance on the (modal) status and the plausibility of the state of affairs expressed in the that-clause. Palmer (1986: 126-131) argues that complement clauses, governed by a lexical subordinator, are either used to indicate the attitudes and opinions of the speaker (I think he's there) or to report the attitudes and opinions of the subject of the main clause, i.e. the original speaker (he requested that they should arrive early). In his study, [START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF] focuses on verbs and adjectives as subordinators that express epistemic and deontic modality. Perkins (1983: 86) clearly ascribes a modal value to noun complement clauses in structures like there is a N to/that in particular.

All these studies acknowledge that head nouns and their complement clauses involve the speaker or another speaker's stance/attitude. Nevertheless, although they help us to understand one of the discursive values of that-clauses, they tell us little about the underlying mechanisms of the phenomenon, viz. the issue of head noun selection. Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 965) provide a sample of 58 head nouns and observe that head nouns are either derived from verbs and adjectives or are "morphologically derivative". These authors thus seem to link the ability of nouns to govern that-clauses to their derivative status. In other words, head nouns govern that-clauses because they derive from syntactic categories which are themselves that taking items. In their description of noun complement clauses, so-called 'appositive clauses' , [START_REF] Quirk | A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language[END_REF]Quirk et al. ( : 1260-61) -61) claim that to govern such a clause, "the noun phrase must be a general abstract noun". It should be pointed out that these accounts might not be entirely convincing since not all head nouns are abstract (picture, sign, slogan, etc.), nor are all of them derived from verbs or adjectives (fact, idea, story, etc.) (cf. Ballier 2004). 6 In contrast, other approaches, such as [START_REF] Nomura | The semantics of the content clause construction in English[END_REF], [START_REF] Schmid | English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells: From Corpus to Cognition[END_REF] and [START_REF] Bowen | Noun Complementation in English. A Corpus-based Study of Structural Types and Patterns[END_REF] carry out a functional analysis to explain how nouns govern thatclauses. In these approaches [START_REF] Nomura | The semantics of the content clause construction in English[END_REF]Schmid 2000 in particular), nouns are classified into different lexical categories such as utterance nouns, cognitive nouns, modal nouns, etc. The underlying assumption of such an analysis is that head nouns have to be understood in terms of their use but not necessarily in terms of their inherent semantic properties. This position is essentially the one adopted by Schmid (2000: 13) in the following passage:7

Why are A-nouns, carrier nouns and shell nouns so hard to define? The reason is that they are not defined by inherent properties but constitute a functional linguistic class. This means that whether a given noun is a shell noun or not does not depend on inalienable characteristics inherent in the noun, but on its use. A noun is turned into a shell noun when a speaker decides to use it in a shell-content complex in the service of certain aims.

Against this position, however, it can be argued that head nouns can be defined and characterized by their inherent semantic properties. In fact, contrary to the approaches discussed so far, other analyses assume that modality appears to be a property which plays a significant role in the selection of head nouns in that-clauses. For instance, Boone (1996: 48-49) and Chevalier & Léard (1996: 54-55) claim that head verbs and nouns, respectively, are modality markers in que-clauses. This claim led them to classify que-clause governing verbs [START_REF] Boone | Les complétives et la modalisation[END_REF] and nouns [START_REF] Chevalier | La subordination nominale: Classes, sous-classes et types sémantiques[END_REF] in three classes of modality, i.e. epistemic, alethic and deontic modality.

The assumption underlying this paper is that modality might be one of the features that provide the finite clause licensing property to head nouns. In other words, it is claimed that head nouns can be semantically and/or pragmatically interpreted as involving a modality feature; therefore they can be classified as nominal modal categories.

Semantic and pragmatic arguments

The claim that head nouns involve inherent modality properties can be supported by the following observation about the polysemic difference between words like philosophy and linguistics. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines these two words as follows: Linguistics: pl. n. [treated as sing.] the scientific study of language and its structure. Philosophy: n. (pl. -ies) 1 the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. 2 the study of the theoretical basis of a branch of study or experience. 3 a theory or attitude that guides one's behaviour.

While both words refer to fields of study, philosophy can also refer to "a theory or attitude that guides one's behaviour". This meaning is the one expressed in the sentence below:

(10) a. Franklin subscribes to the Apple philosophy that if you can encourage children to use your products, they will continue to use them when they are adults.

(BYU-BNC)

In this sentence, the speaker evaluates the propositional content (that if you can encourage…) as a philosophy, as a theory that guides Apple's policy. When we manipulate the sentence and replace philosophy with linguistics, the result is not acceptable at all:

(10) b. Franklin subscribes to the Apple *linguistics that if you can encourage children to use your products, they will continue to use them when they are adults.

In contrast, if we insert a noun such as idea, assertion, doctrine etc., the sentence is always correct, although the degree of epistemic commitment will be different with each noun. Our postulate is that linguistics is unacceptable precisely because it has no evaluative property similar to the one philosophy has as a that taking noun. Thus, the word philosophy governs a that-clause thanks to its polysemic status, study of vs. opinion or attitude. In contrast, apparent co-hyponyms such as linguistics, geography, chemistry cannot take that-clauses because these words lack the semantic feature opinion or attitude.

The idea underlying this observation is that head nouns intrinsically involve modal features that allow the speaker to express his/her opinions or attitudes. For instance, it is obvious that nouns like certainty, requirement and (dis)advantage have semantic properties of, respectively, epistemic, deontic and attitudinal-evaluative modality. This can be perceived in the following sentences:

(11) Such evidence must be balanced with the certainty that stone of the appropriate type does occur in the Drift of eastern England (Penny 1974, p. 248) (Figure 2.20).

(BYU-BNC) (12)
The requirement that all motor vehicles (except invalid carriages, police and local authority vehicles) used on a road must be covered by third party insurance is fundamental to the lawful operation of any haulage business.

(BYU-BNC)

(13) This logic has the advantage that it protects the more efficient contractor and exposes the less efficient and is thus conducive to efficiency in the long run.

(BYU-BNC)

In ( 11), the that-clause is epistemically qualified; the speaker expresses his/her commitment to its plausibility in terms of certainty. In ( 12), instead of expressing epistemic commitment through the that-clause, the speaker reports on the state of affairs in terms of desirability or obligation. In ( 13), the speaker adopts an attitudinal standpoint towards the state of affairs expressed in the clause. In this case, the evaluation is positive, but the attitudinal evaluation can be negative as well, as in:

(14) Washed sand or gravel should settle immediately, but these have the disadvantage that they do not provide mineral nutrients for the plants. (BYU-BNC)

In addition, nouns that govern that-clauses do not only denote the speaker's own commitment or assessment, as in ( 11)-( 14), but also another person's commitment (attitudes and opinions):

(15) However, Culpitt's assertion that the post-war collectivist welfare state and its value premises are now obsolete is clearly open to question. (BYU-BNC).

Notice that the comment is clearly open to question is expressed by the speaker him/herself. In such utterances, the speaker reports another person's assertion or modal commitment and then comments on it. These observations are in line with many analyses of modality. Palmer (1986: 96, 121), for instance, suggests that epistemic (including alethic) and deontic modality have in common "the involvement of the speaker". And Nuyts (2005: 17) goes a step further in claiming that epistemic (with alethic), deontic, and boulomaic modality (notions to be defined below) all indicate the extent to which the speaker or another person is committed to the state of affairs expressed in the that-clause. According to [START_REF] Nuyts | Modality: Overview and linguistic issues[END_REF], they indicate the degree of existential, moral and affective commitment, respectively. In fact, modality appears to play a major role in that complement clauses; the following section therefore defines what we mean by "modality".

Definitions of modality

Modality has been given a considerable number of definitions, ranging from a broad concept in which any sort of assertion may contain modality to a narrow concept in which only modal verbs and some adverbs can convey modality (see also Salkie 2008: 78). Le Querler (1996: 49-61), summarizing different views on modality, claims that between these two conceptions there is another which considers modality as the expression of the speaker's attitude towards the propositional content. This view is in line with Palmer's (1986: 16) definition when he says that modality is "the grammaticalization of speakers' (subjective) attitudes and opinions". According to Le Querler (1996: 63-64), the definition of modality, in relation to the speaker, requires its classification in three kinds of modality: subjective, intersubjective and objective. She defines these types, respectively, as the relation between the speaker and the propositional content, the relation between the speaker and another speaker, and the relation between the propositional content and another proposition. If we take this view, subjective modality orientation seems to be the type expressed in most finite noun complement constructions. This would particularly be the case if we view finite subordination in general and that-clause noun complementation in particular as the expression of the speaker's position towards the plausibility or the desirability of the propositional content (Heyvaert 2003: 82-83;Chevalier & Léard 1996: 53;Martin 1983: 97-98). However, it should be noted that objective modality can also be expressed in nominal that-clause constructions such as:

(16) a. There is always the possibility that the input pronunciation will differ from the pronunciation in the lexicon.

(BYU-BNC) b. Un tel état de masse négative n' a évidemment aucun sens physique, mais il peut être réinterprété dans le cadre d'une théorie de champ quantique pour l' électron, c' est-à-dire une théorie qui envisage la possibilité que des électrons soient aussi créés ou détruits.

(Frantext ) "Such a state of negative mass does not have obviously any physical sense, but it can be reinterpreted within the framework of a quantum theory of field for the electron, i.e. a theory which considers the possibility that electrons are also created or destroyed. " (My translation)

As we pointed out in Section 3.1, [START_REF] Chevalier | La subordination nominale: Classes, sous-classes et types sémantiques[END_REF] distinguish between three types of modality in head nouns: epistemic, alethic and deontic. In addition to these types, we can distinguish another type involved in noun complementation: evaluative/attitudinal modality. Nouns such as problem, (dis)advantage, worry convey an attitudinal or evaluative commitment of the speaker or another speaker towards the propositional content. According to Nuyts (2005: 12), "[t]his category [boulomaic] indicates the degree of the speaker's (or someone else's) liking or disliking of the state of affairs".

Another category, dynamic modality, is distinguished in many modality studies [START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF][START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF][START_REF] Perkins | Modal Expressions in English[END_REF][START_REF] Nuyts | Modality: Overview and linguistic issues[END_REF]. With regard to the actual status of this category, [START_REF] Salkie | Modals and typology: English and German in contrast[END_REF][START_REF] Salkie | Degrees of modality[END_REF] and others argue that ability can, which is considered as conveying dynamic modality, should in fact be relegated to the periphery of modality categories. According to Salkie (2008: 85-88;2009: 81-89), dynamic modality is a peripheral/low degree modality category since it does not meet most of the criteria he establishes, including possibility/necessity, epistemic/ deontic and subjectivity. He argues that dynamic modality, unlike epistemic or deontic modality, neither involves any possibility/necessity in terms of "possible worlds", nor any subjectivity in terms of a high degree of commitment. Interestingly, nouns to which dynamic properties can be ascribed, such as ability or capacity, hardly take that-clauses. For instance, these two nouns would not be acceptable in (16a/b), whereas others, such as necessity, probability or evidence, can appear in such utterances. In this study, we limit our investigation to epistemic, alethic and deontic modality while excluding boulomaic/attitude modals (for reasons of space) as well as dynamic modal expressions (as they are only marginally relevant).

Epistemic modality refers to the types of semantic judgments or assessments that concern the speaker's knowledge or belief of the proposition. Through nominal epistemic items, speakers express their degree of certainty or belief with regard to a state of affairs as in (11) in English or as in (17) in French.

(17) J' ai acquis la certitude que dans le cul-de-sac temporel où je me suis fourvoyé il n'y a pas âme qui vive.

(Frantext) "I got the certainty that in the temporal cul-de-sac where I was misled there is no living soul. "

(My translation)

Secondly, alethic modality concerns the speaker's estimation of the (degree of) logical necessity or possibility of the proposition, as illustrated (16a/b) and ( 18):

(18) La persistance des espèces parasites est dominée par la nécessité que l' animal jeune ou la larve rencontre, à une phase définie de son existence, l' espèce le plus souvent strictement déterminée où il doit pénétrer et évoluer.

(Frantext) "The persistence of the parasitic species is dominated by the need that the young animal or the larva, in a specific phase of its existence, meet the most strictly determined species where it must penetrate and evolve. "

(My translation)

Finally, deontic modality involves permission, obligation or moral desirability of the proposition. Thus, any head noun that conveys any of these semantic features is considered deontic in this study (for more on these definitions see [START_REF] Lyons | Semantics[END_REF][START_REF] Lyons | Linguistic Semantics[END_REF][START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF][START_REF] Huddleston | The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language[END_REF][START_REF] Nuyts | Modality: Overview and linguistic issues[END_REF]. In (12) and in ( 19), the speaker qualifies the that-clause as, respectively, a requirement and an obligation.

(19) Ainsi la voie fut ouverte pour convoquer une conférence constitutionnelle sur requête de la majorité, tandis qu' était maintenue l' obligation que tout amendement fût ratifié par les membres permanents du conseil de sécurité… (Frantext) "Thus the way was open to convene a constitutional conference on request of the majority, while the obligation was maintained that any amendment be ratified by the permanent members of the Security Council. " (My translation)

As far as the first two modality classes (epistemic and alethic) are concerned, some scholars, [START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF] for instance, make no distinction between them. The decision to distinguish between them in this study is motivated by two reasons: first, nouns that involve alethic and epistemic modality do not behave similarly when selecting mood; prototypically they do not select the same mood in the same proportion. For instance, Martin (1983: 118-124) claims that in French, epistemic expressions generally select the indicative, while alethic modality, like deontic modality, mostly selects the subjunctive. The second reason for distinguishing between epistemic and alethic modality is that this distinction mirrors the distinction between the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. Nuyts (2005: 9, 13-14), in discussing Lyons ' (1977) account, observes that "the distinction between alethic and epistemic modality shows some similarity to that between objective and subjective epistemic modality. "

Head nouns and mood selection

Outline

The aim of this second part is to show that the use of the indicative or the subjunctive in complement that-clauses is correlated to the lexical item governing the subordinate clause. More particularly, it is hypothesized that the correlation between the lexical head and mood alternation depends on the head's modality type. This hypothesis is tested through a corpus-based comparative analysis of mood alternation in French and in English.

English subjunctive

There are basically three distinctive uses of the subjunctive in English: mandative, formulaic and volitional use (also called 'were-subjunctive' , cf. [START_REF] Quirk | A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language[END_REF], as illustrated in examples ( 20), ( 21) and ( 22):

(20) I suggest that he leave. (Berk 1999: 149) (21) God save the Queen. / God be with you. (Berk 1999: 150) (22) I wish I were a bird. (Berk 1999: 150) As these examples show, the main formal characteristic of mandative and formulaic subjunctives (both are also called present subjunctives) is the lack of the third person singular concord of the indicative mood on the main verb. As a consequence, the present subjunctive and the present indicative forms are indistinguishable in all the other persons except in the third person singular. According to Quirk et al. (1985: 156), the mandative is considered "the most common use of the subjunctive, [and] occurs in subordinate that clauses". Next to the subjunctive forms, language users can also opt for the so-called "putative (mandative) should" (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 157, 784) in complement thatclauses, as illustrated in example 23.

(23) The suggestion that the new rule should be adopted came from the chairman. [START_REF] Quirk | A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language[END_REF](Quirk et al. : 1262) ) As Quirk et al. (1972: 784) state, putative should "is used quite extensively in thatclauses to express not a subordinate statement of fact, but a 'putative' idea". Furthermore, the same authors (1972: 784) point out that should appears "in contexts where, historically speaking, a present subjunctive might be expected", which is to say that putative should can be considered as a substitute for the present subjunctive. Therefore, the two forms (putative should and the present subjunctive) were combined in some of the data processing.

French subjunctive

Formally, French has four subjunctive tenses: present, past, imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive. But in practice only two forms (present and past) are commonly used, with the other two playing only a marginal role in literary or very formal language (cf. [START_REF] Riegel | Grammaire Méthodique du Français[END_REF][START_REF] Soutet | Le Subjonctif en Français[END_REF]). The French subjunctive can either appear in independent/main clauses (examples 24 and 25) or in subordinate clauses (examples 26-28):

(24) Que le ciel vous protége! / Vive le roi! [START_REF] Riegel | Grammaire Méthodique du Français[END_REF] In contrast to examples 24 and 25, where the use of the subjunctive is not required by any explicit formal item, its use in ( 26) and ( 27) is governed by a lexical item (vouloir/ordonner/souhaiter and sans que respectively). Even for an example like (28), Soutet (2000: 117) argues that the use of the subjunctive is to some extent required by the verb chercher (which involves an idea of investigation), although he acknowledges that the modal force is weaker in this case than in (26). According to [START_REF] Soutet | Le Subjonctif en Français[END_REF], chercher and other verbs like vouloir (volition) in ( 29) or avoir besoin de (necessity) in ( 30) are the items that require the subjunctive in utterances such as:

( These observations about the English and French subjunctive suggest that in both languages, the uses of the indicative and the subjunctive in subordinate clauses appears to be related to the governing item, viz. the head noun in the present study. The correlation between these moods and the governing nouns is analyzed in the following subsections to determine whether the modal category of the governing noun is significant in the use of one mood or the other.

Hypotheses

The analyses in this section are based on the following hypothesis: the choice of mood (indicative/subjunctive) is related to the modality type of the governing head. As Martin (1983: 117) Kupferman (1996: 142) also supports this position when he asserts that the contrast between the subjunctive and the indicative is basically a matter of tendency.

According to Martin (1983: 118), the use of the indicative and the subjunctive can be explained on a probability scale, as illustrated in Figure 1: The common ground between [START_REF] Martin | Pour une Logique du Sens[END_REF] and [START_REF] Kupferman | Observations sur le subjonctif dans les complétives[END_REF] positions is that mood alternation should not be viewed as a question of which predicate requires which mood, but rather which predicate tends to license which mood. Therefore, [START_REF] Martin | Pour une Logique du Sens[END_REF] suggests that the use of the indicative and the subjunctive should not be regarded as a clear-cut dichotomy but as a gradience like in Figure 1 above. Note that the types of utterances discussed by Martin (1983: 116-139) include que-clauses governed by a verb (il semble qu'il a/ait fait telle chose), noun clauses (attirons l' attention sur le fait qu'il a/ait pris une telle décision sans nous informer) or adjective clauses (Pierre n' est pas certain que Sophie viendra/vienne), and relative clauses (je suis à la cherche d'un emploi qui me permette/permettra de…).

In addition to this probability tendency, Martin (1983: 119-124) argues that mood alternation should be understood in terms of "possible worlds" and "universes of belief ". According to him, alethic and deontic modalities exist in the space of "possible worlds", where the proposition they govern is not considered as what it is, but as what it could be or should be. Thus, alethic and deontic expressions mostly select the subjunctive to indicate that the proposition belongs to those worlds. As for epistemic predicates, Martin (1983: 133-139) postulates that they govern either the indicative or the subjunctive depending on their polarity. If we assume that these observations are correct, we can put forward the following hypotheses: a. That/que-clauses governed by epistemic nouns will primarily select the indicative but also accept the subjunctive according to their pragmatic interpretation; hence, a high frequency of the indicative is to be expected after these expressions. b. That/que-clauses governed by alethic and deontic nouns primarily select the subjunctive or related structures, although the indicative is not completely excluded; hence, a high frequency of the subjunctive is to be expected after these heads.

These hypotheses are tested using corpus analysis and statistics. Specifically, we aim to examine, first, whether mood alternation is a matter of tendency correlated with modality classes, and, second, the extent to which a particular mood is used with each of the three types of modality (i.e. alethic, deontic or epistemic). While it might seem problematic to apply an analysis of French mood to English, this will in fact allow us to determine whether the findings apply cross-linguistically. Although the subjunctive does not necessarily appear under the same qualitative and quantitative conditions in the two languages, the relevance of modality properties in mood selection should be observable cross-linguistically.

Data analysis

Data collected from the English and French corpora are presented in Tables 1 and2, respectively. First of all, let us bear in mind that the corpora investigated are very different in size and composition; differences in text type might influence the choice for a particular mood. However, it should also be kept in mind that the purpose of these statistics is not to compare the English and French figures directly, but to show that in each of the two languages the use of the indicative and the subjunctive can be related to the modality type of the head noun. In this respect, as we have already said, tendencies can be identified and the relative frequencies of the categories can be compared. Nevertheless, we should point out that the subjunctive seems much more alive in French than in English. In comparing its use in our data set, we note considerable differences -Table 3 summarizes them.

One can observe that out of 779 occurrences in the English material, only 94 contain subjunctive forms or should, while in the French data 72 occurrences of the subjunctive out of a total of 410 occurrences of que-clauses (12.1% against 17.6%).

The data in Tables 1 and2 reveal two important observations: first, the English data set does not contain instances of an epistemic noun licensing the subjunctive, and even the use of putative should is extremely low (0.9%). In both English and French, the indicative is by far the most frequently used mood with epistemic nouns in that-clauses, i.e. 87.5% in English against 75.8% in French. The main difference between the two languages is that the subjunctive is used in around 6.10 % of occurrences in the French data set in contrast to the English data set. This first observation lends cross-linguistic support to our first hypothesis (i.e. epistemic nouns mostly select the indicative); in English, purely epistemic nouns do not even seem to accept the subjunctive at all.

The second general observation relates to findings across categories: the English data show a fall in the use of the indicative, ranging from 87.5% in the epistemic category over 64.6% in the alethic category to 11.4% in the deontic category. In the French data, the indicative is also most frequently used with epistemic nouns (75.8%) compared to deontic nouns (17.6%) and alethic nouns (10.2%). Conversely, the use of the subjunctive and should is significantly higher after deontic nouns (55.1% subjunctives + should in English and 55.9% subjunctives in French) than after epistemic nouns (0.9% in English and 6.1% in French). Alethic nouns have a much lower subjunctive selection rate in English (1.3% subjunctive + should) than in French (67.3%). The question to be addressed next is how to interpret these observations. Beyond generalizations, it is likely that a close look at the lexical classes should reveal the mechanisms underlying these mood selection tendencies among lexical nominal classes and the properties that favor one mood or the other.

Epistemic nouns favor the indicative

As noted above, the 319 English that-clauses governed by epistemic nouns do not include a single one that licenses the formal subjunctive. As Heyvaert (2003: 82) claims, there is a tight link between indicative and epistemic modals since they both express "the speaker's position with respect to the plausibility of the propositional content of the clause". Thus, one can assume that they can be considered as part of the same semantic conceptual continuum. This suggests that the high/exclusive use of the indicative with epistemic nouns is a phenomenon to be expected. This tendency is observable in both our English and French data, even if French epistemic nouns tend to accept around 6% of subjunctive. [START_REF] Martin | Pour une Logique du Sens[END_REF] and others [START_REF] Riegel | Grammaire Méthodique du Français[END_REF][START_REF] Soutet | Le Subjonctif en Français[END_REF]) have attempted to explain this phenomenon. [START_REF] Martin | Pour une Logique du Sens[END_REF] justifies the use of the subjunctive after expressions like le fait que by arguing that they mark the proposition as an existing reality, while also indicating that this reality could have been different. In other words, in an utterance like le fait que Pierre soit venu est tout de même bon signe (Martin 1983: 131), ("the fact that Pierre be here is nevertheless a good sign" -my translation) the speaker asserts reality (Pierre-come back), but places it in a counterfactual world, where (Pierre might not have come). Thus, when the proposition is asserted as a reality existing in a factual world, the head noun governs the indicative. However, when the proposition denotes an existing reality that is perceived as potentially counterfactual, the head noun selects the subjunctive. For instance, in a sentence such as (33), the speaker uses the subjunctive to indicate that the state of affairs described by the propositional content is not necessarily what was or could be expected.

(33) Les points de repère pourraient d' ailleurs être déterminés par le fait que je choisisse à l' avance mes textes et que je les relie par mes commentaires.

(Frantext ) "In fact, the bench marks could be determined by the fact that I choose my texts in advance and that I connect them by comments. "

(My translation)

Thus, the subjunctive indicates that the state of affairs could have been different, i.e. ne pas choisir mes textes ("not to choose my texts"), which explains its use in (33).

Deontic and alethic nouns favor the subjunctive

Analysis reveals that French and English deontic nouns choose the subjunctive/ should more frequently than the indicative. Chi-square results for deontic nouns requiring the subjunctive/should are highly significant in both English (χ 2 = 45.343 (df = 1), p < 001) and French (χ 2 = 6.76 (df = 1), p < .01); this suggests that part of our second hypothesis -deontic nouns would mainly license the subjunctive -is verified for both languages. As for the other part of the second hypothesisalethic nouns would also select the subjunctive more frequently -this is supported for French (10.2% indicative vs. 67.3% subjunctive) but not for English (64.6% indicative vs. 1.3% subjunctive/should). The chi-square result confirms [START_REF] Martin | Pour une Logique du Sens[END_REF] observation that the French alethic category more frequently selects the subjunctive. In sum, French deontic and alethic nouns more frequently select the subjunctive. In English, the deontic class selects the subjunctive more frequently, whereas the alethic class, like the epistemic class, mostly requires the indicative. The notion of modality "class" is important here, since, within these classes, individual nouns vary with respect to the mood selection proportion. For instance, in French, nouns from the deontic class, such as contrainte or obligation, are frequently used with the indicative, even though the class as a whole, or the other nouns in it, selects the subjunctive. Notice that French contrainte is used with 50% indicative vs. 20% subjunctive in our data, and that English constraint is the deontic noun which has the highest use of the indicative (25%).

Gradience in modality classes

Is the contrast observed in the previous section, i.e. that the epistemic class more frequently selects the indicative and the deontic or alethic class more frequently selects the subjunctive, related to any gradience in modal class or to a lexicalsemantic interpretation of the nouns? Indeed, different nouns may belong to the same class, but not share the same degree of being an element of that class. For instance, in the alethic class, necessity in both its occurrences selects mandative should in English against 14.3% indicative, 57.1% subjunctive and 28.6% of ambiguous cases in French. As for probability/probabilité, it favors the indicative (86% indicative vs. 0% subjunctive and should in English; 11% indicative vs. 44.5% subjunctive in French; the other 44.5% are non-distinctive forms).

Such discrepancies within the same class can be explained by Heyvaert's (2003: 82-85) approach (cf. Section 4.3.1 above). It could even be argued that modality as a semantic property allowing mood selection can be considered as a system set in an integrated continuum. If we assume that epistemic, alethic and deontic classes are the fundamental constituents of modality, then the integrated continuum is a tripartite circular system; the three modality types in relation to mood selection form a system, as Figure 2 illustrates: One can see that this system, in relation to mood selection, would have the epistemic class as the starting point of the circular continuum, followed by the alethic class and then by the deontic class. This hypothesis would explain the discrepancies in Tables 1 and2. In fact, nouns may belong to a particular modality class without sharing the same degree of class membership. In other words, an alethic noun like probability is closer to the epistemic class than necessity, which is semantically closer to the deontic class. An utterance such as (34) clearly shows that the former is closer to epistemic fact/evidence, while the latter, in (35), has greater affinity with deontic requirement/obligation.

(34) If he suspected Pascoe, Rain had to concede the probability that he was right.

(BYU-BNC) (35) In trying to find answers, managers -whether they were heads or governors -were caught between the need to make progress and to prepare for broad changes which had been widely publicized by central government and to prepare for the necessity that they should lead changes. (BYU-BNC)

Therefore, as the analysis above reveals that the epistemic class is the one that mostly accepts the indicative, it becomes possible to understand why probability has a high indicative percentage (86% against 14% used with modal verbs in English). Similarly, it is not surprising that necessity should license the mandative subjunctive/should more frequently than the indicative (its two occurrences are used with should), because it is close to the deontic class (nouns that involve obligation, permission, etc.) -a class which tends to choose the subjunctive. In French nécessité ("necessity") is used in similar proportions: 14.3% indicative and 57.1% subjunctive, with the remaining 28.6% non-distinctive forms.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that the presence of a modality feature is a common intrinsic property of that taking nouns. The lexical classification of nouns into modality classes has proved to be an efficient method to underpin our claims. First, the analysis has revealed that the presence of a modality feature is a necessary condition for a noun to govern a that-clause. However, further investigations need to be carried out as to whether it is a sufficient condition. Second, corpus analysis and statistics have provided support for the hypotheses and have revealed explicit mechanisms guiding the choice of mood in English and French noun complement clauses. Again, the classification of head nouns into lexical modality groups appears to be an efficient procedure in determining which modality class favors which mood. Thus, epistemic nouns (in both English and French) mostly or exclusively select the indicative. Alethic and deontic nouns favor one mood or the other depending on their degree of modality class membership. Both classes seem to favor the subjunctive in French, whereas in English the former chooses the indicative while the latter selects the subjunctive. The closer a noun is to the epistemic class, the more likely it is to license the indicative. Conversely, the further removed a noun is from the epistemic class, the more likely it is to license the subjunctive. Accordingly, the results support the concept of a scalar continuum in mood alternation, as put forward by [START_REF] Martin | Pour une Logique du Sens[END_REF] -see Figure 1. Further studies should elaborate this concept in greater detail.

Finally, with regard to the interpretation of modality in overall that noun complementation, three fundamental modality levels can be observed. The head noun conveys the first type of modality, which indicates the speaker's attitude/commitment as epistemic, alethic or deontic. The second modality ascription is performed at the subordination level, which marks modality orientation. The type of modality conveyed by the head noun is generally subjective, since it is the speaker who expresses/describes his/her personal or another speaker's stance towards the propositional content. Yet, modality orientation can also be objective, viz. when the speaker uses alethic expressions or logical constructions. And the third level of modality encoding concerns mood in relation to the head noun. It marks the proposition as being asserted/factual through the use of the indicative or as nonasserted/unreal when the subjunctive is used.

Notes

* Special thanks to Nicolas Ballier, Raphael Salkie, Catherine Léger and Eleanor Hendricks for their advice and perceptive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any remaining errors are mine. Many thanks to Emmanuel Ferragne for his advice and comments on the Chi-square test.

1. For the concept of "modality orientation", see [START_REF] Halliday | An Introduction to Functional Grammar[END_REF].

2. Source: http://www.atilf.fr/atilf/produits/frantext.htm (accessed September 2009).

3. Probability may also be considered as epistemic in the literature. Notice that in most linguistic studies on modality, there is no distinction between epistemic and alethic modal expressions [START_REF] Palmer | Mood and Modality[END_REF] for instance).

4. [START_REF] Biber | Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English[END_REF] and [START_REF] Ballier | La complétive du nom dans le discours des linguistes[END_REF] describe head nouns as expressing the speaker's modal stance, but do not put them explicitly in modality classes.

5.

Source http://www.webcorp.org.uk/webcorp_linguistic_search_engine.html (accessed September 2009). For further information see:, http://www.webcorp.org.uk/guide/, http://wse1. webcorp.org.uk/preview/ (accessed September 2009).

6.

Examples of picture, sign, slogan used as head nouns:

With a 10% increase in sales over the last study period, we have a clear picture that the Chinese book market is being more gradually influenced by the translated books. (Webcorp) Madeleine picked up her fork and began to eat. This was the sign that the children could start eating too. (BYU-BNC) This positive part of conventionalism most plainly corresponds to the popular slogan that judges should follow the law and not make new laws in its place. (BYU-BNC) 7. [START_REF] Schmid | English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells: From Corpus to Cognition[END_REF] uses the terms ' A-nouns' , 'carrier nouns' and 'shell nouns' to refer to what is also called head nouns.

8.

Example: I wrote up these notes immediately after each occasion and as soon as they were typed, sent copies to those involved with the request that they verify that the substance and the spirit of each occasion were accurately and adequately recorded. (BYU-BNC). 9. By "ambiguous cases", we mean the non-distinctive forms of the verb between the indicative and the subjunctive.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure1. Use of the subjunctive and the indicative in French (afterMartin 1983: 118)

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Lexical Modality classes continuum

  The use of the subjunctive obeys tendencies much more than rules, and, thus, rigid concepts are bound to fail. […] Studies carried out during the last decade even point out examples with the indicative in contexts where it would not have been expected; the same goes for the subjunctive. "

	He illustrates his claim by examples (31) and (32) among others:
	(31) Il semble qu'il a / ait fait telle chose.	(Martin 1983: 117)
	"It seems that he did /do (subjunctive) such a thing. "	(My translation)
	(32) Il est possible qu' on parviendra un jour à greffer un coeur neuf ou du moins en
	bon état.	(Martin 1983: 117)
	"It is possible that one day one will manage to transplant a new heart or at
	least one in good condition. "	(My translation)

suggests, we deal with mood alternation in terms of tendency:

L' emploi du subjonctif obéit à des tendances beaucoup plus qu'à des règles, et, ainsi, les conceptions rigides se vouent elles-mêmes à l' échec. […] Les travaux des dix dernières années apportent même des exemples d'indicatif où on ne l'attendait guère; et inversement de subjonctif. "

Table 1 .

 1 English data

	Modality	Nouns	Occ. Indicative	Subjunc-	should	Modal aux. Ambigu-
	classes				tive			ous cases 8
	Epistemic	assertion	79	69 (87%)	0	2 (3%)	8 (10%)
	nouns (319)	certainty fact	40 100	32 (80%) 92 (92%)	0 0	0 1 (1%)	8 (2%) 7 (7%)
		hypothesis 100	86 (86%)	0	0	14 (14%)
	Total		319 279 (87.5%)	0	3 (0.9%)	37 (11.6%)
	Alethic	likelihood 100	67 (67%)	0	1 (1%)	32 (32%)
	nouns (302)	necessity possibility 100 2	0 42 (42%)	0 1 (1%)	2 (100%) 0	57 (57%)
		probability 100	86 (86%)	0	0	14 (14%)
	Total		302 195 (64.6%)	1 (0.3%)	3 (1%)	103 (34.1%)
	Deontic	constraint 12	3 (25%)	0	4 (33.3%)	4 (33.3%) 1 (8.4%)
	nouns (158)	demand request	30 16	4 (13.3%) 13 (43.3%) 9 (30%) 1 (6.2%) 6 (37.5%) 6 (37.5%)	2 (6.7%) 0	2 (6.7%) 3 (18.8%)
		require-	100	10 (10%)	23 (23%) 26 (26%)	27 (27%) 14 (14%)
		ment
	Total (779)		158	18 (11.4%) 42 (26.6%) 45 (28.5%) 33 (20.9%) 20 (12.6%)

Table 2 .

 2 French data

	Modality	Nouns	Occ.	Indicative Subjunc-	Condi-	Ambiguous
	classes				tive	tional	cases
	Epistemic	affirmation 42	38 (90.5%) 0	4 (9.5%)
	nouns (327)	certitude fait	94 100	82 (87.2%) 0 65 (65%) 12 (12%)	12 (12.8%) 1 (1%)	22 (22%)
		hypothèse	91	63 (69.2%) 8 (8.8%)	8 (8.8%)	12 (13.2%)
	Total		327	248	20 (6.1%)	25 (7.7%)	34 (10.4%)
				(75.8%)
	Alethic	vraisem-	10	1 (10%)	7 (70%)	0	2 (20%)
	nouns	blance
	(49)	nécessité	7	1 (14.3%)	4 (57.1%)	0	2 (28.6)
		possibilité	23	2 (8.7%)	18 (78.3%) 0	3 (13%)
		probabilité 9	1 (11%)	4 (44.5%)	0	4 (44.5%)
	Total		49	5 (10.2%)	33 (67.3%) 0	11 (22.5%)
	Deontic	contrainte 10	5 (50%)	2 (20%)	0	3 (30%)
	nouns (34)	exigence demande	11 5	0 0	9 (81.8%) 4 (80%)	0 0	2 (18.2%) 1 (20%)
		obligation	8	1 (12.5%)	4 (50%)	2 (25%)	1 (12.5%)
	Total (410)		34	6 (17.6%)	19 (55.9%) 2 (5.9%)	7 (20.6%)

Table 3 .

 3 Frequencies of the subjunctive in the English and French corpora

	Corpora	Occ.	Indicative	Subjunctive	Modal verbs Ambiguous
				(+ should)		cases 9
	English	779	492 (63.15%) 94 (12.1%)	173 (22.2%)	20 (2.55%)
	French	410	259 (63.20%) 72 (17.6%)	27 (6.5%)	52 (12.7%)