Abstract
Poplack, Shana - "Prescription, intuition and usage: inherent variability and the French subjunctive. Is mood choice in French syntactically or semantically motivated ? Systematic empirical analysis of mood usage in a corpus of spoken Canadian French leads to the conclusion that the subjunctive is one variant of a linguistic variable which may alternate with the indicative and the conditional in certain embedded noun clauses. Variable rule analysis of the contribution of semantic versus morphosyntactic factors to the choice of subjunctive mood reveals that this process is conditioned by the latter, suggesting that the choice of subjunctive is inherently variable and not determined by meaning. Moreover, it appears that the contemporary state of affairs is neither an innovation nor limited to Canadian dialects, but is rather a synchronie reflex of mood variability throughout the history of French language.
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