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Information Structure and Reference Tracking in Complex Sentences
Edited by Rik van Gijn, Jeremy Hammond, Dejan Matić, Saskia van Putten and Ana Vilacy Galucio
[Typological Studies in Language 105] 2014
► pp. 193–228

Mood selection in the complement of negation matrices in Spanish

| Illinois State University

Following Lambrecht’s (1994, 2001) theory of Information Structure and drawing a conceptual parallel with Mejías-Bikandi’s (1994, 1998) account of mood distribution in Spanish complements, this study analyzes mood selection in the complement of negation and doubt matrices in Spanish in terms of the informational value of the proposition expressed in these complements. The main conclusion is that the use of the subjunctive mood in the complements of negation and doubt matrices is not motivated because these complements express a proposition known to be false, as it has been traditionally claimed in the literature, but rather because these complements express a proposition treated as present in the consciousness of both speaker and audience at the time of utterance. Keywords: Spanish; mood; subjunctive; complements

Published online: 5 March 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.105.07las
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