Commitment and States of Mind with Mood and Modality

This paper develops an account of mood selection with attitude predicates in French. I start by examining the “contextual commitment” account of mood developed by Paul Portner and Aynat Rubinstein (P&R). I raise empirical and theoretical challenges for P&R’s analysis of contextual commitment and its role in P&R’s explanations of mood selection. There are indicativeselecting verbs that are felicitous in contexts where there isn’t contextual commitment (in P&R’s sense); and there are subjunctive-selecting verbs that involve no less contextual commitment (in P&R’s sense) than certain indicativeselecting verbs. I develop an alternative account of mood selection in French. Thegeneral approach, which I call a state-of-mind approach, is to analyzemood in terms of a relation between a predicate’s modal backgrounds and a representation of a relevant overall state of mind. I propose that indicative mood in French presupposes that the informational-evaluative state determined by the predicate’s modal backgrounds is included in the informational-evaluative state characterizing the event described by the predicate. This account provides an improved explanation of various puzzling mood-selection phenomena. These phenomena include subjunctive-selection with emotive factives, indicative-selection with fiction verbs, indicative-selection with espérer ‘hope’ versus subjunctive-selection with vouloir ‘want’, and indicative-selection with commissives versus subjunctive-selectionwith directives. Themood-selection properties of these predicates can be derived from the proposed account of mood, independently attested features of the predicates’ semantics, and general principles of interpretation.