THE EFFECT OF NEGATION ON MOOD CHOICE IN SPANISH OBJECT CLAUSES

The problem of the negation influence on the choice of mood has not received enough attention in Spanish studies. An overview of theoretical works in the field of generative grammar where researchers touch upon the issues of verb semantics, pragmatic nature of the sentence, the use of elements of negative polarity, the aspects of the theory of negation shift brings to the impossibility to consider this problem exclusively within the framework of structural analysis. Most problems raised within the framework of generative research remain unresolved and require further research. The analysis of the material enabled to draw several conclusions. First, negation syntactic shift does not impact the mood choice; being pragmatically determined, it introduces additional connotations into the original sentence. Second, the phenomenon of grammatical negation shift can not be explained by the term of negative polarity and is independent of their use. Pronomination phenomenon is not a factor influencing the choice of the mood, since there is a possibility of using both the subjunctive and the indicative mood within the same sentence in terms of its syntax and lexical composition (excluding the subordinate clause, which is replaced by a pronoun)...

Dialect Contact and the Acadian French Subjunctive: A Cross-Varietal Study

This study investigates mood choice for five Acadian French communities in Atlantic Canada which have intertwined settlement histories but which differ in terms of type and degree of dialect contact. The two communities with least contact with supralocal French preserve the highly salient imperfect subjunctive, moribund or absent from most other present-day spoken French varieties. While four communities exhibit high selection rates for the present subjunctive, in line with variationist analyses of other French varieties, one community has surprisingly low rates of such usage, along with absence of the imperfect subjunctive. This dichotomy is explained by the local prestige of the smaller of two founder groups for the community, settlers from Haute-Bretagne, France, a dialect area for which the historical record reveals low levels of subjunctive forms. The results highlight the importance not only of demographic factors but also of local identity construction in the formation of new contact varieties.

Desires, wishes and hopes – Desiderative predicates and presuppositions

The expression of a desire – a wish, a request, a demand, one’s will – triggers a presupposition. This has grammatical consequences, such as mood choice in Romance, verbal positioning in Germanic or complementizer selection in Slavic. Desiderative predicates are argued to contain special features of (counter-) factivity. This explains the strikingly similar behavior of emotive factive and implicative predicates as well as volitional and request expressions; it also captures some common characteristics with negated affirmative predicates.

Mood choice in complements of Spanish comprender and Portuguese compreender (‘understand’) – distribution and meaning

The present paper analyzes the occurrence of indicative and subjunctive complements of the verbs comprender (Spanish) and compreender (Portuguese) in European Spanish and European Portuguese. A quantitative analysis based on 400 occurrences of the complements randomly selected from the newspaper genre shows that the indicative mood occurs more frequently than the subjunctive mood in both languages, although the subjunctive mood is more frequent in the Portuguese corpus than in the Spanish one. The analysis also shows that the occurrence of the subjunctive complement is highly restricted to contexts in which the subject of the main clause verb is either 1st person or 3rd person singular. From the theoretical perspective of Cognitive Grammar, the mood alternation is explained by the concept of dominion, i.e. the indicative complement designates an event that is located within the conceptualizer’s epistemic dominion, whereas the subjunctive complement designates an event that is located outside the conceptualizer’s dominion of effective control.

Assertability conditions of epistemic (and fictional) attitudes and mood variation

Italian is a well-known exception to the cross-linguistic generalization according to which `belief' predicates are indicative selectors across languages. We newly propose that languages that select the subjunctive with epistemic predicates allow us to see a systematic polysemy between what we call an expressive-`belief' (featuring only a doxastic dimension) and an inquisitive-`belief' (featuring both a doxastic and an epistemic dimension conveying doxastic certainty (in the assertion) and epistemic uncertainty (in the presupposition)). We offer several previously unseen contrasts proving this distinction and offer a new analysis for mood choice cross-linguistically. We argue that the distinction between expressive and inquisitive attitudes is not an idiosyncrasy of non-factive epistemics. We provide novel data, showing that fictional predicates (dream, imagine) license the subjunctive. We explain the indicative/subjunctive alternation by again appealing to epistemic uncertainty and disentangling expressive from inquisitive-fictional meanings. We thus pave the way for a new typology of attitudes relying on this systematic polysemy and propose new criteria to explain mood distribution cross-linguistically.

Age and input effects in the acquisition of mood in Heritage Portuguese

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environment. The results show a significant effect of the age at testing and the amount of input in the acquisition of the subjunctive. In general, acquisition is delayed with respect to monolinguals, even though higher convergence with the monolingual grammar is observed after twelve years of age. Results also reveal that children with more exposure to the heritage language at home show faster acquisition than children from mixed households: the eight- to nine-year-old age boundary seems relevant for those speakers with more exposure, and the twelve- to thirteen-year-old age boundary for those with less exposure.

The case of the conditional and the imperfect in variable mood-choice contexts in second-language and native-speaker Spanish

The current study builds on research on mood distinction in Spanish, which has focused on the subjunctive mood, by examining the full inventory of verb forms that second-language learners and native speakers (NSs) of Spanish use in mood-choice contexts. Twenty NSs and 130 learners corresponding to five proficiency levels completed three oral-elicitation tasks. The results show that participants use a wide repertoire of tense/mood/aspect forms in mood-choice contexts and that NSs and learners use largely the same forms. An analysis of the conditional and imperfect suggests that learners tend to restructure and strengthen their form-function connections between these verb forms and a range of functions.

Extending the dominion of effective control – Its applicability to mood choice in Spanish and Portuguese

Within the model of Cognitive Grammar, the concept of dominion is fundamental to the analysis of the conceptualizer's attitude toward an event or a proposition. However, the concept has, first and foremost, been understood in epistemic terms, whereas there has been less concern with the conceptualizer's efforts to influence and manipulate the course of events in the world. This being so, the present paper shows that the conceptualizer's dominion of effective control is relevant in a number of linguistic contexts. The analysis provides evidence for this particular feature in factive contexts, deontic contexts, contexts of volition and causation, and in adverbial clauses of purpose, manner and condition. The analysis further shows that the conceptualizer's dominion of effective control is capable of providing a conceptually grounded explanation for the occurrence of the Spanish and the Portuguese subjunctive mood in these grammatical contexts.

Interfaces in the interpretation of mood alternation in L2 Spanish

In this paper, we present the results of one written task testing the interpretation of mood choice in if-conditional constructions in L2 Spanish: a linguistic task of conditional utterances containing both regular and irregular indicative and subjunctive forms was completed by 48 L1 French and 40 L1 English speakers, and by an L1 Spanish control group (n = 35). Results show a similar pattern in the answers of both experimental groups despite the varying degree of similarity and disparity among the languages. We adopt a cognitive pragmatic perspective for the analysis of the results in connection with the various kinds of effects created by mood alternation in the constructions studied. Furthermore, in relation to current SLA debates (Lardiere 2008, 2009), our findings demonstrate that feature re-assembly in L2 Spanish is not trouble-free, as simple current feature accounts would advocate, even if those features exist in the learners’ L1.

Heritage and Foreign Language Learner Use of the Spanish Subjunctive in Advice

Previous research indicates that heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish tend to produce the subjunctive more than FL learners (e.g., Fairclough, 2005; Potowski, 2007). However, these studies have focused mainly on written production, and research on oral production has yielded contradictory findings (Fairclough, 2005; Lynch, 2008; Martínez Mira, 2006). This classroom-based research study (1) compares HL and FL learners’ subjunctive use and patterns of interlanguage mood choice in a paired oral activity in which students gave advice and (2) investigates whether learners negotiate meaning or form with each other in regard to mood selection. Twenty university students enrolled in fifth-semester Spanish (13 HL and 7 FL) were grouped into 7 HL-FL and 3 HL-HL pairs. Results indicate that HL learners were significantly more likely than their FL peers to produce the subjunctive in the structures where it was expected. HL and FL learners alike rarely negotiated for meaning or form with regard to mood choice.