The mood system of Myanmar

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to present the mood system of Myanmar within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The mood system of Myanmar is composed of two simultaneous systems: mood type and mood force. The former focuses on describing the methods of exchange including declarative, interrogative, and imperative, while the latter focuses on the "language force"embedded in the exchange. In this study, certain structures for Mood realization and Mood particles used by Myanmar speakers are presented for each type and subtype of the mood type and mood force systems of Myanmar. The findings show the interpersonal metafunction of Myanmar language makes an important contribution to further contrastive studies between the mood systems and their realizations of Myanmar and those of foreign languages.