Mood Across Constructions: A Unified Approach

Abstract

The present paper provides a uniform treatment of mood morphology across constructions in Spanish, including: (a) mood selection in complement clauses of attitude verbs and in matrix clauses, (b) mood alternation in relative clauses and, tentatively, (c) mood alternation in conditional clauses. We argue for the following combination of ingredients from different approaches: (i) mood tracks the modal architecture of the embedding verb, not the local context set; (ii) mood introduces a world pronoun, not world quantification; and (iii) indicative mood is presuppositionally heavier than subjunctive mood.