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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario
Edited by Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-Corominas
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11] 2017
► pp. 9–31

Chapter 1
Embedding verbs and subjunctive mood

The emotive factor

| Ghent University & University of Zürich

I give a uniform account of French mood from a semantic and nano-syntactic perspective by revising the criteria for the distribution of indicative vs. subjunctive mood. I claim that the subjunctive is selected by the semantic property of emotivity encoded in the main clause verb. I develop a definition and a syntactic representation of emotive vs. non-emotive verbs and a set of diagnostics for the two classes. I also reexamine the notion of veridicality and show that it is not the determining factor in the choice of mood (contra Giannakidou 1998, 2009, a.o.).

Keywords: mood, dependent clauses, French, emotivity, nano-syntax, lexical semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, 2011; Caha 2009)
    • 2.2Veridicality, non-veridicality, and relative veridicality
  • 3.Personal constructions
    • 3.1Decomposing the meaning(s) of verbs
    • 3.2 Dowty (1991)
    • 3.3Emotive vs. non-emotive sentience
    • 3.4Verbs optionally taking indicative or subjunctive CPs: Emotive vs. non-emotive readings
  • 4.Impersonal constructions
  • 5.The proposal
    • 5.1The structures of personal constructions
    • 5.2The structures of impersonal constructions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.01bau
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