Mood across constructions: A unified approach [handout]

Maribel Romero (Universität Konstanz)

The Indicative/Subjunctive dichotomy in Romance surfaces in several constructions, including mood selection in complement clauses and mood choice in relative clauses. Studies in the literature have typically considered only some constructions, leading to two main contending partial approaches: (A) Comparison approach (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997, Portner & Rubinstein 2020) and (B) Context Set approach (Schlenker 2005, cf. von Fintel 1997). In this paper, we show that neither approach derives the correct pattern for both complement clauses and relative clauses in Spanish. To cover them both, we propose a unified approach that combines the following ingredients from the two main contenders. First, the modality expressed by mood needs to be formulated in terms of simplexmodal content (Approach A), not in terms of the local context set (Approach B). Second, mood introduces a world pronoun (Approach B), rather quantification over worlds (Approach A).