MoL-2024-04: Spencer-Piacentini, Fiona (2024) Wondering about Mood in Romance: the view from Italian inquisitive predicates. [Report]
![[thumbnail of MoL-2024-04.text.pdf]](https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
MoL-2024-04.text.pdf - Published Version Download (878kB) |
Abstract
This thesis considers formal approaches to accounting for the distribution of verbal mood (indicative/subjunctive) in Romance languages. Our language of focus is Italian, the most rebellious of the main Romance languages with respect to verbal mood. Italian is widely known to present a puzzle when it comes to belief: for Italian licenses, with a strong preference for, the subjunctive in the complement of credere ‘to believe’. Yet, a related new puzzle which to date has received no formal treatment is that Italian is also an outlier when it comes chiedersi ‘to wonder’ for here too is the subjunctive licensed and preferred contra to what is seen across the board in Romance for ‘to wonder’. In the example below, the mood licensing properties of ‘to believe’ and ‘to wonder’ in Italian and French are contrasted:
(1) a. Daniel si chiede se Sandra sia.subj/è.ind colpevole.
b. Daniel se demande si Sandra est.ind/*soit.subj coupable.
‘Daniel wonders whether Sandra is guilty’
c. La giuria crede che Sandra sia.subj/??è.ind innocente.
d. Le jury croit que Sandra est.ind/*soit.subj innocente.
‘The jury believes that Sandra is innocent’
Whilst current formal approaches to the indicative and subjunctive do not discuss inquisitive predicates, we seek to fill this gap and along the way try to address several other puzzles. Crucially, the two aforementioned puzzles that arise from Italian do not exhaust the number of puzzles that Italian presents in this area. For adding to the complexity of trying to account for Italian is that the language is seen as exhibiting high mood flexibility (as is seen with the emotive factives which license both moods but with no attributable difference in meaning).
In addressing the cross-linguistic puzzles of ‘to believe’ and ‘to wonder’, we build on existing work by Mari and Portner 2021 which regards the subjunctive licensing of credere to depend on the question of the complement ?p being raisable in the common ground but we use the framework of Inquisitive Semantics (Ciardelli, Groenendijk, and Roelofsen 2018) in order to yield predictions for predicates which embed interrogatives.
Our main contributions are as follows: we extensively review three current families of approaches to verbal mood (Chapter 3); we introduce novel cross-linguistic data on inquisitive predicates and discuss the prospects for extending the theories from the previous chapter (Chapter 4); we introduce an implicational map in the style of Haspelmath (Chapter 5) and in Chapter 6 we present a comparison-based theory which can handle embedded interrogatives and thereby give predictions for the mood licensing of inquisitive predicates. Thus providing the first formal account of inquisitive predicates in the verbal mood literature.
| Item Type: | Report |
|---|---|
| Report Nr: | MoL-2024-04 |
| Series Name: | Master of Logic Thesis (MoL) Series |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Subjects: | Language Logic |
| Depositing User: | Dr Marco Vervoort |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Jun 2024 13:06 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Jun 2024 13:06 |
| URI: | https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/eprint/2313 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
