The study of grammatical mood has a long tradition in philology and linguistic semantics. Typologically, we find morphological distinctions such as indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative. Focussing on the subjunctive versus indicative contrast, traditional grammars typically identify the indicative with realis and the subjunctive with irrealis, and describe the contrast in terms of selec...

Previous research has shown that the Spanish subjunctive is a vulnerable mood in the process of acquisition for adult heritage speakers. Specifically, the subjunctive use in optional contexts tends to be more prone to simplification (i.e. in adjectival clauses). This subjunctive emerges in monolingual Spanish-speaking children as early as two years of age and reaches more adultlike development ...

David Chalmers’ conceivability argument against physicalism relies on the entailment from a priori conceivability to metaphysical possibility. The a posteriori physicalist rejects this premise, but is consequently committed to psychophysical strong necessities. These don’t fit into the Kripkean model of the necessary a posteriori, and they are therefore, according to Chalmers, problematic. But ...

Many native English speakers (myself included), when first studying a Romance language, are quite surprised and confused by the sheer diversity of inflectional endings that Romance verbs display. While the richer morphological distinctions between different gender and number combinations is not entirely unfathomable due to the somewhat similar distinctions in forms of “be”, particularly fascina...

In this paper I explore the structure of Russian subjunctive and indicative clauses, and demonstrate the asymmetries between them. The first asymmetry is the phenomenon of subject obviation, i.e. ban on coreference between the pronominal subject of the embedded subjunctive clause and the subject of the matrix clause. The second asymmetry is the fact that the long-distance scrambling of subjects...

In this paper, we study the subjunctive relative clause as a means to understand the relation between (non)veridicality, existence and event actualization. I argue that the subjunctive in the relative clause carries a presupposition of epistemic uncertainty as to the existence of a referent for the modified NP. This uncertainty can only be satisfied in non-veridical contexts, hence the distribu...

Saint Anselm of Canterbury offered several arguments for the existence of God. We examine the famous ontological argument in Proslogium ii. Many recent authors have interpreted this argument as a modal one.1 But we believe that Jonathan Barnes has argued persuasively that Anselm’s argument is not modal.2 Even if one were to construe the word ‘can’ in the definite description ‘that than which no...

In this paper, I offer a unified semantic analysis of subjunctive conditionals that purports to account for their truth and felicity-conditions. The proposal is centered on the claim that the temporal morphology that occurs in subjunctive conditionals in several genetically unrelated languages plays an essential role in the composition of their meaning. I will argue for a time-dependent notion ...

This paper aims at an account of the German ‘‘reportive subjunctive’’, where the mood signals that the proposition is the object of an utterance report. The report can be explicit in the sentence or in the context, or more or less implicit. We interpret these uses as a more or less local verification or accommodation of a presupposition introduced by the subjunctive, thus accounting for a range...