Abstract
Subjunctive mood in complement clauses is licensed under selection from certain predicates or under the scope of a modal or negation. In contexts where mood choice varies, such as the complement of a negated epistemic verb no creer, it introduces a contrast in interpretation. The subjunctive is thought to contribute to a shift in the modal anchoring of the embedded clause, and is consequently interpreted as indicative of a dissociation between the epistemic models of the speaker and the subject. We provide evidence that these uses also interact with pragmatic context. Given independent claims that 1) the overt realization of first person subject pronouns is contrastive and 2) it generally serves to anchor discourse to the speaker’s perspective and 3) overt use is particularly frequent with epistemic verbs, we examined the interaction between negation, first person subject pronoun realization, and mood of the dependent clause for the verb creer. An analysis of oral speech from the Proyecto de Habla Culta revealed that for negative sentences (no creo que), yo is overtly realized more frequently for cases with exceptional indicative dependents than for those with canonical subjunctive dependents; there was no association with mood for affirmative uses of creer. These results support analyses where negation has specific scope over the contrastive subject, rather than over the epistemic clause. As a consequence, the matrix proposition remains an assertion and use of indicative complements is licensed.
Highlights
Mood plays a fundamental role in our interpretation of utterances, by expressing a perspective over the truth-value of the proposition
We hypothesize an interaction between subject of an epistemic verb and mood of its dependent clause, given previous claims that the overt realization of first person subject pronouns generally serves to anchor the discourse to the speaker’s space (Oliva & Serrano 2010) and that their use is frequent with epistemic verbs (Posio 2014)
Concluding remarks Our analysis explored a potential association between the expression of the subject pronoun with the epistemic matrix no creo que and the selection of an indicative complement
Summary
Mood plays a fundamental role in our interpretation of utterances, by expressing a perspective over the truth-value of the proposition. Indicative is described as the default mood of assertion, whereas subjunctive is assigned a variety of meanings, including non-assertion, desire, obligation, influence, prospectivity or futurity (Rivero 1971; Bosque 1990; Quer 1998; Fábregas 2014) None of these interpretations can subsume the range of its uses. The subjunctive is licensed primarily under selection from certain predicates or the scope of a modal or negation In polarity contexts such as the complement of a negated epistemic verb no creer, mood choice is variable and introduces contrasts in interpretation. In the absence of negation, the embedded complement of strongly assertive and weakly assertive predicates typically appears in indicative mood This is the case of the epistemic verb creer (‘to believe’) (1a). According to Takagaki (1984), the epistemic matrix verb creer is thought to be SUBJUNCTIVE AND SUBJECT PRONOUN REALIZATION: A STUDY OF ‘(YO) NO CREO QUE’
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