Abstract
This article proposes a multifactor analysis of the Spanish subjunctive adjuncts. By examining the features that govern Spanish mood and their interaction, I present a complete overview of diverse accounts on the Spanish subjunctive. I outline the general principles of those explanations and comment on their advantages and disadvantages in formalizing an explanation concerning the interaction of mood with syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Next, from mood contribution to the flow in discourse, based on Quer’s (1998, 2001) approach, I provide a role for the subjunctive mood in the discourse, which can be established by a variety of factors. Instead of assigning rigid meanings to the subjunctive, this approach allows the speaker to relate the proposition to the actual world and provide an evaluation of it. In addition to this, I present a proposal to explain mood alternation in adjuncts considering the interaction of different components of the grammar in the process of interpretation. This contribution offers a dynamic view of meaning in which context and individuals are crucial for the interpretation of the Spanish subjunctive.
Highlights
Mood is a morpho-syntactic category that serves to express the evaluation of a proposition
In Spanish, there have been numerous studies associating the subjunctive mood with invariant meanings, or typically following the rough realis/irrealis opposition (Givón 1994; Picallo 1985; Kempchinsky 1986; Rochette 1988; Giorgi & Pianessi 1997; Rivero 1971; Goldin 1974; Lavandera 1983; and Lunn 1989a, 1995, among others)
I aim at characterizing mood in terms of model shift and contributing to the flow in discourse from a dynamic view of context change
Summary
Mood is a morpho-syntactic category that serves to express the evaluation of a proposition. These elements add different and additional issues to the complexity of the Spanish mood choice that are relevant for subjunctive adjuncts These studies highlight the speaker’s point of view and the ways in which s/he uses mood alternation to convey additional information; this is not possible to explain under a syntactic or semantic account. This author states that the semantics of the Spanish subjunctive enables speakers “to express clear-cut directives, desires, evaluations and judgments, and to voice uncertainties, doubts, half-truth and tenuous thoughts” (Lozano 1995: 113) In spite of his contribution to the analysis of the Spanish subjunctive, it is not quite clear how to explain the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses, which involve considerations such as specificity in mood selection.
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