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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:3 (2021) ► pp.357–381

Prescriptively or descriptively speaking?

How ‘information-quality’ influences mood variation in Spanish emotive-factive clauses

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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.

Keywords: mood variation, verbal mood, subjunctive, indicative, Spanish, emotive-factives
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Emotive-factive predicates
    • 1.2Why does this variability occur?: semantic approaches to mood
    • 1.3Why does this variability occur?: a pragmatic approach to mood
  • 2.Pragmatic presupposition and mood choice
    • 2.1Pragmatic presupposition
    • 2.2Pragmatic presupposition and old information
    • 2.3Old information and the subjunctive
  • 3.The theory of ‘information-quality’
    • 3.1Information-quality and mood variation with emotive-factives
  • 4.The current study
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Instrument creation
      • 5.2.1Corpus search
      • 5.2.2Acceptability judgment tasks
        • I.Contextualized acceptability judgment task
        • II.Context-free acceptability judgment task
    • 5.3Data collection
      • 5.3.1Language background questionnaire
      • 5.3.2Acceptability judgment tasks
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Contextualized acceptability judgment task
      • 6.1.1The indicative with new and old information
      • 6.1.2The subjunctive with new and old information
    • 6.2Context-free acceptability judgment task
    • 6.3Contextualized AJT vs. context-free AJT
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Contextualized acceptability judgment task
    • 7.2Context-free acceptability judgment task
    • 7.3Contextualized AJT vs. context-free AJT
  • 8.Concluding remarks
  • 9.Future research
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 22 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19044.fau
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