Abstract
This chapter is devoted to subjunctive mood, a phenomenon which shares a number of important properties with Irrealis Genitive. First, the chapter introduces the subjunctive/indicative contrast in Romance languages and in Russian on a descriptive level. The introduction is followed by a detailed review of the analysis of subjunctive complement clauses proposed by Farkas ( Assertion, belief and mood choice. Paper presented at the workshop on Conditional and Unconditional Modality, ESSLLI, Vienna, 2003). This analysis, formulated within the framework of dynamic semantics, relates subjunctive mood to the absence of commitment to either truth or falsity of the proposition they contribute. A distinction is introduced between strong intensional verbs (e.g. epistemic and fiction predicates), whose complements are indicative, and weak intensional verbs (e.g. desideratives and directives), which do license subjunctive mood. I further consider the way in which Farkas’ analysis can be extended to account for the choice of mood in additional environments.
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Notes
- 1.
In this sense, it differs from the sentence Je pense que Jean n’écrira pas la lettre‘I think that Jean will not write the letter’. Here, negation appears in the embedded clause, and the proposition Jean will write the letteris entailed to be false in all the possible worlds within ESp,w.
- 2.
It still remains to be explained why, in such negative sentences as (6), the mood of the complement clause is not obligatorily subjunctive. It can be indicative as well, as demonstrated by the Russian example below:
(ii)
Ja ne pomnila, čto my ob etom govorili.
I NEG rememberPSTthat we about this speakPST
'I didn’t remember that we had talked about this.'
As will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 5, the choice of indicative mood in complement clauses embedded under negation contributes a commitment that the embedded proposition is true according to the speaker. (In (ii), we can contradistinguish the speaker’s beliefs at speech time and her beliefs at the time of the event. Here, the commitment to truth is relative to speech time.) Thus, while the remembering state is being negated, the embedded proposition is presupposed to be true. This, in turn, means that the clause is positively decided relative to the matrix context set. Crucially, this makes it +Decided, which accounts for the use of the indicative.
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Kagan, O. (2013). Subjunctive Mood and the Notion of Commitment. In: Semantics of Genitive Objects in Russian. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 89. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5225-2_3
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