Mood selection in Romance and Balkan

Abstract

This paper assembles, synthesizes, and considers a range of data concerning mood selection in Romance and Balkan. An account of the appearance of subjunctive morphology under factive emotives in Romance is proposed. It is argued that factive emotives occur with subjunctive because indicative, with its assumption of speaker commitment to the truth of the embedded proposition, is ruled out due to pragmatic constraints on the redundant repetition of the factive presupposition that would occur. Subjunctive mood morphology is argued to fill in as a kind of default. This analysis is extended to a range of mood distribution facts in Romance and Balkan languages, and implications of the proposal are discussed. It is proposed that Romance and Balkan differ in the semantic contribution of indicative, and that in Balkan indicative is associated with certainty on the part of the subject (not necessarily the speaker). This analysis is applied to various data concerning mood distribution in Balkan, including the existence and properties of Polarity Subjunctive in Balkan. The ways in which Romance and Balkan mark various mood-related distinctions are also discussed. A particular analysis of the notion of subjunctive-as-default mood is briefly sketched.