O czym mówimy, kiedy mówimy o trybach? Kilka uwag na temat italianistycznej terminologii językoznawczej

In this article, I attempt to discuss the notion of grammatical mood (modo), which in the Italian linguistic terminology is ambiguous, since it refers to both morphosynctatic and semantic phenomena. The analysis of entries in selected dictionaries and Italian grammars enables us to observe that mood expresses the attitude of the speaker towards the propositional content, and, within this category, we can distinguish non-fi nite moods (infi nito, gerundio, participio) and fi nite moods (indicativo, imperativo, condizionale, congiuntivo). While the latter is closely related to modality, it remains unclear how the use of non-fi nite verb forms, such as the infinitive, would influence the modality of an utterance. Ultimately it seems that the finite – non-finite opposition is rather of morphosyntactic nature and should be explicitly distinguished from the category of grammatical mood (as modality), which, on the other hand, can be attributed only to finite forms.