Article published in:
Variation within and across Romance Languages: Selected papers from the 41st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Ottawa, 5–7 May 2011
Edited by Marie-Hélène Côté and Eric Mathieu
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 333] 2014
► pp. 233–254

On subjunctives and islandhood

| Ghent University
| University of Geneva
This article discusses the relation between selection, subjunctive mood and extraction facts. We show that the degree of permeability observed in subjunctive clauses with respect to, e.g., wh-extraction is apparent, and is only indirectly related to the indicative/subjunctive alternation. We examine different verb classes in French and show that the behavior of various types of wh-phrases in extraction contexts is not directly linked to the mood of the embedded clause. We therefore propose (i) that the indicative-subjunctive distribution is a property of predicates that has to be distinguished from the property involved in complementizer selection. In a nutshell, in French, the subjunctive-indicative alternation can be accounted for in terms of the emotive–cognitive property of the matrix predicate; and (ii) that islands effects, that is, the degree of permeability of the embedded clauses can be related to the properties of the selected complementizer. In other words, the possibilities of extraction of a wh-phrase from an embedded clause can be accounted for by the size of the complementizer that acts as a more or less strong blocker for wh-extraction from the clause it selects. We therefore propose that mood ‘selection’ and complementizer selection are two independent properties of the main predicate.
Published online: 17 December 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.333.16bau
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