Mood variation with belief predicates: Modal comparison in semantics and the common ground

This paper proposes that subjunctive in the complement of belief sen- tences in Italian expresses a relation between the attitude holder’s beliefs and the common ground. In contrast to most other Romance languages, ‘believe’ commonly and prescriptively takes subjunctive in Italian, though indicative is found as well, and as has been observed in the literature, the choice of indicative or subjunctive has semantic effects. We show that the indicative with ‘believe’ is used when the belief statement describes the personal mental state of the holder of the attitude, an interpretation that follows from the traditional Hintikkean semantics. In contrast, we show that subjunctive with ‘believe’ is used to mark a relation between the content of belief and the discourse context. To analyze these facts, we propose that the modal quantification present in attitude reports comes not from the attitude verb, but instead from the embedded verbal mood. What differentiates Italian from related languages where ‘believe’ only takes indicative, is that Italian allows the subjunctive to access the com- mon ground as a modal base, utilizing the verb’s doxastic background as an ordering source. The fact that subjunctive relates the common ground to the subject’s beliefs explains the discourse oriented meaning of this combination. We extend our analysis to several other predicates that show mood variation in Italian.

Prescriptively or descriptively speaking?

It is generally put forth that Spanish has the subjunctive as the required mood in the complements of emotive-factives (alegrarse de que ‘to be happy that’), desire verbs (querer ‘to want’), verbs of uncertainty (dudar ‘to doubt’), modals (ser posible que ‘to be possible that’), causatives (hacer que ‘to make that’), and directives (recomendar que ‘to recommend that’) (e.g., Real Academia Española 2011). However, in spite of these traditional rules, it has been observed that some of these environments allow for the indicative (Blake 1981; Crespo del Río 2014; Deshors and Waltermire 2019; Gallego and Alonso-Marks 2014; García and Terrell 1977; Gregory and Lunn 2012; Kowal 2007; Lipski 1978; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Waltermire 2019). The current study explored one such environment; emotive-factive clauses. Results showed that the presuppositions that speakers hold regarding the knowledge that their addressees possess influence the mood that they select. This, thus, demonstrates the important role that pragmatics plays in the occurrence of mood variation.

The indicative vs. subjunctive alternation with expressions of possibility in Spanish

This study explores the indicative vs. subjunctive alternation in Spanish subordinate clauses following epistemic adverbials and expressions of possibility. Anchored in semantic-pragmatic and variationist theoretical frameworks, traditional research on mood alternation in Spanish remains largely experimental in nature. In contrast, we adopt a corpus-based multifactorial methodology to investigate 4,199 occurrences of fourteen expressions of possibility extracted from the Corpus del Español (e.g. caso de que, poder ser que, por si acaso, posiblemente, etc.) annotated contextually for structural, semantic and stylistic variables. Methodologically, we conduct an exploratory multiple correspondence analysis followed by a confirmatory binary logistic regression to examine whether/how the linguistic contexts affect mood variation. Overall, the results indicate that previously unexplored semantic factors (such as the inherent lexical aspect of verbs in subordinate clauses) significantly influence mood variation in Spanish. Ultimately, our results suggest that subjunctive uses are less uniform and more prone to internal variation than indicative uses.

Pragmatic Mood Variation in Bilingual and Monolingual Yucatec Spanish

While linguists (e.g. Michnowicz 2009, 2012; Solomon 1996, 1999; Klee 2009) have described some of the unique features of Yucatec Spanish related to the lexicon , the phonetic system, and syntactic structure, but no work has focused on pragmatics in this variety. The current study utilizes semantic/pragmatic interviews to investigate four cases of pragmatic mood alternation: Suspended Assertion, Reportative Distance, Individualized Reference, and Reactional Assertions. The results examined suggest important differences between monolingual and bilingual speaker reaction to pragmatic triggers. The bilingual Yucatec Maya/Spanish speakers’ perception of pragmatic change in mood varies between the four groups of pragmatic effects; the bilingual speakers were sensitive to Reactional Assertions and Reportative Distance but not sensitive to changes in Suspended Assertion or Individualized Reference. This demonstrates a difference in pragmatic sensitivity to mood selection between bilingual and monolingual speakers of this contact variety. Specifically, bilingual speakers select mood that patterns with monolingual speakers when it is syntactically motivated, but their mood selection differs in areas where this selection pragmatically motivated.