Abstract
An analysis of the interpretation of indicative/subjunctive contrasts in embedded clauses is pursued here that, rather than attaching rigid meanings to each mood, views mood shifts as the overt marking of a change in the model for the evaluation of the proposition or property expressed by the embedded clause. From this perspective, mood morphology conveys information about model flow in discourse, which can be determined by a variety of factors ranging from lexical meaning of embedding predicates to different aspects of discourse interpretation and context change. The proposal identifies and analyzes the parameters that induce model shift in subordinated domains. This allows us to distinguish core cases of subjunctive selection from more peripheral ones, both within a language and crosslinguistically, and it also provides us with an explanation for several empirical problems that a rigid interpetation of mood leaves unresolved. The analysis offered concentrates on mood distribution in Catalan and Spanish.
© Walter de Gruyter