Mood selection in Yucatec Spanish: veridicality as the trigger

• Autores: Kathryn P. Bove
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 241, 2020
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Mood selection under doxastic, or belief, predicates in Spanish have been traditionally treated as cases of polarity subjunctive: affirmative predicates license the indicative and negated the subjunctive. In previous accounts of mood in Spanish, researchers (i.e. Haverkate, 2002, Quer, 1998, Mejías-Bikandi, 1998, Mejías-Bikandi, 2016) argue that either subjunctive or indicative is felicitous under negation as mood in this environment is pragmatically motivated. Yucatec Spanish is a contact variety that allows the use of the subjunctive in both affirmative and negated doxastic predicates. I use Yucatec Spanish data to argue that mood is licensed by the speaker's epistemic uncertainty, not negation. As an alternative, I adopt the notion of (non)veridicality (Giannakidou, 1998, Giannakidou, 2015, Giannakidou and Mari, 2020) and follow Mari's (2016) proposal of suppositional subjunctive selection to argue that mood is triggered by the evaluation of the proposition in Yucatec Spanish. When a speaker of Yucatec Spanish evaluates a proposition as nonveridical, she recognizes the possibility that the proposition could be either true or false. In such cases, the speaker selects the subjunctive in the embedded clause regardless of the presence or absence of negation. Other nonveridical environments (i.e. interrogatives and modals) are also briefly discussed as both license higher rates of subjunctive use in Yucatec Spanish.