Cross-linguistic Variation

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, we implement our analysis of subjunctive as the reflex of an emotive feature in the different languages of our study. We first focus on French, applying our theoretical framework to the various cases. We then tackle variation within the group of Romance languages (in particular French and Italian), examining the predicates in the light of our revised typology. We also deal with Balkan languages, which, as was mentioned previously, exhibit important surface differences with respect to Romance languages. We show that our approach is able to account for the distribution and realization of embedded subjunctives in these languages as well. However, it appears that ‘emotive factives’ in Balkan languages resist our approach. A detailed discussion of these is postponed to Chap. 6. Finally we turn to embedded subjunctives in Hungarian. We use the language as a testing ground for our system, and reach the conclusion that the Hungarian data, as the Balkan one, passes the test satisfactorily on most aspects, making thus an important step towards confirming the validity of our approach. Again, we postpone the detailed analysis of the problematic cases to Chap. 6.