Edited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 33–66
Non-veridicality is at the heart of more than just the verbal subjunctive. The main distinction we drew is the free application of the subjunctive and the non-veridical mood in dependent sentences. Greek and the Romance languages are among the representatives of this syntactic-semantic design of the subjunctive in syntactic dependency. While this was the case in past periods of German, the use of the subjunctive in dependent sentences and in free occurrence came to enact chains of indirect and reported speech. Colloquial modern German uses the subjunctive as an expression of non-veridicality no longer as an instantiation of mood, but of attitude, of illocutionary Force (in Rizzi’s CP-expansion). Two questions are addressed: (1) How are nonverbal categories related to mood; (2) What has triggered the diachronic loss of epistemic expression in colloquial German.