Chapter 1
Embedding verbs and subjunctive mood
The emotive factor
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.).
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
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