Lexicalization and Social Meaning of the Italian Subjunctive

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The usage of the Italian subjunctive, particularly in the context of embedded completive clause, can be considered a normative linguistic stereotype par excellence, to which speakers should pay particular attention if they want to speak ‘properly’. However, despite the massive effort of the normative enterprise, as well as the much scholarly attention garnered from linguists, overall consensus on what exactly constrains mood selection in discourse is not unanimous: whether it makes a semantic contribution, which verbs should trigger it, whether it signals more careful style. Grammarians are also concerned with the attrition of the subjunctive and its productivity in speech, fearing the loss of its supposed semantic contribution. Several studies have addressed these issues, but only a small amount of this body of work on Italian subjunctive has utilized a quantitative method and these assumptions have not been evaluated systematically under an accountable empirical methodology. The findings of the present variationist investigation illuminate new evidence in the patterning of subjunctive use in community-based spontaneous speech data and refuting the claims that it is productive and semantically-motivated. The analysis reveals a lexically motivated pattern of variation, i.e., the use of the subjunctive is mainly restricted to a handful of main clause verbs and a single embedded verb. Systematic analysis also shows a correlation between subjunctive choice and higher level of education, a social meaning that further strengthens the idea that no semantic contribution is made when the speaker opts for the subjunctive over the indicative, a phenomenon that is inherently variable.