Background

Abstract

AbstractThe chapter provides the background to our discussion of subjunctive. We first provide a detailed presentation of the phenomenon of embedded subjunctive and its typical environments, drawing on examples from the language groups that we are targeting, namely Romance languages and Balkan languages, with additional comparative data from English and Hungarian when relevant. We then turn to an overview of the semantic and syntactic literature on subjunctive, with a focus on the studies which are closest to our own approach and constitute the ground layer on which we build our own analysis. We also outline the theoretical framework within which we develop our proposal, with an short introduction to the cartographic approach and to the Nanosyntactic theory. We conclude the chapter by giving the outline of our own proposal.