Clausal vs. verbal mood

Before I present the comparative analysis of Romance and Slavic subjunctive data in further detail, I will begin by first describing more precisely what is meant by the notion of clausal mood, and how the latter can be related to the notion of verbal mood, which is a more familiar term in the context of the subjunctive. These two notions will be seen as closely related, because distinctive verbal morphology in relation to mood marking will be shown to be correlated to distinctive clausal properties.³² The most relevant observation that will be made in this context when it comes to Slavic subjunctive in particular is that the latter shares a cluster of common clausal properties with its Romance verbal mood counterpart, and can hence be subsumed under the definition of the subjunctive as a clausal mood.

The notion of clausal mood that I will be using here is based on a similar notion of sentential mood, put forward by authors such as Harnish (1994) or Jary&Kissine (2014), among others. These authors defined the concept of sentential mood in terms of a systematic cluster of

31 The analysis put forward by these authors was based primarily on Italian data.

32 The distinctive clausal properties that we will observe in this context are only related to complements that were previously defined as Subj1, whereas Subj2-type clauses, once again, pattern more closely with indicatives than they do with Subj1 complement in this sense. Therefore the notion of clausal mood that I am using here only applies to Subj1.

56

related formal, semantic and overt morpho-phonological properties associated with a given sentence type, which are observed regardless of the presence or absence of distinctive verbal morphology for this sentence type in a given language. The sentential-mood analysis has typically been applied to imperatives, the basic idea being that, even though not all world languages contain dedicated imperative verb forms, they should nonetheless all feature the type of sentences that allow to express directive speech acts (the latter being usually seen as the primary function associated with the imperative mood³³). Hence the implication is that those languages which do not contain imperative verb forms should nonetheless contain the imperative as a sentential mood.

The analysis in terms of sentential mood is not entirely transferable to subjunctive complementation, primarily because this notion was applied to the sentence as a whole and was thus seen as crucially related to the prototypical function and the illocutionary force associated with a given sentence type. Subjunctive clauses, on the other hand, cannot be analyzed in terms of a prototypical illocutionary function, because they typically appear in embedded CP structures with no direct access to illocution, which is why one cannot fully apply the notion of sentential mood as I just described it to the subjunctive. Nevertheless, this does not make it impossible to view the subjunctive as associated with a distinct clause type, because the notion of clause type need not necessarily be related to illocutionary force: we have already seen, for instance, that verbs can select for interrogative or declarative clause types in embedded contexts (e.g. 62-63), which exhibit different clausal properties (distinct CP-marking, among others), without entailing any kind of shift in the illocutionary force of the sentence as such (both sentences in (62-63) being interpreted as declarative as a whole). I will argue that the same applies to subjunctive vs. indicative complementation as well: the latter can also be analyzed as involving two distinct clause types, which do not directly influence the illocutionary force of the entire sentence.

This is where the notion of clausal mood comes into play. If we replace the term sentential mood with clausal mood, this allows us to maintain most aspects pertaining to the sentential-mood analysis that I introduced earlier on (in particular the idea that mood marking should not necessarily be seen as synonymous with distinctive verbal morphology), while only removing the issue of illocutionary force from consideration. Clausal mood will thus also be analyzed in terms of a cluster of common morpho-syntactic and semantic properties associated with a given clause type, which are shared across languages regardless of whether this clause

33 See Jary&Kissine (2014) and the references therein.

57

type also exhibits distinctive verbal mood morphology or not. This is the approach that I will apply to Slavic subjunctive throughout the remainder of this dissertation.

Note that using the notion of clausal mood (or syntactic mood, depending on the exact terminology one employs) in the context of the analysis of the subjunctive, as opposed to exclusively viewing the latter as a verbal mood, is not by any means new to this study. Various authors have already proposed a similar analysis of the subjunctive in a number of languages where the latter is not associated with dedicated verbal morphology. One could mention, for instance, Landau (2004), who suggested a similar approach in the context of Hebrew, which does not contain subjunctive morphology but does contain what the author defined as a syntactic subjunctive clause type, which shares a number of clausal properties associated with subjunctive complements in those languages where the subjunctive is also marked through verbal morphology. The same type of analysis was also extensively applied to languages of the Balkan region, such as Greek or Romanian, which, similarly to Slavic, contain no subjunctive verbal morphology but do contain a subjunctive marker in the left periphery of the clause (Farkas, 1984; Krapova, 1998; Philippaki-Warburton, 1994; Rivero, 1994 a.o.).³⁴ All of these languages have been analyzed as exhibiting subjunctive-type clauses which share some of the clausal properties observed with their counterparts in those languages, such as Romance, where subjunctive is also marked as a verbal mood.

Slavic subjunctive can be viewed through this same prism.³⁵ We have already seen a number of indications which point towards a possible analysis of the Slavic subjunctive as a separate clausal mood: Slavic subjunctive-type complements we looked at so far were associated with distinctive morphological marking on the left periphery of the clause, which appeared in the same types of syntactic contexts as subjunctive verbal morphology in Romance, i.e. in complements to intensional verbs such as desideratives. In the following paragraphs, I will reinforce the analysis of Slavic subjunctive as a clausal mood by showing that subjunctive clauses in Slavic languages also share a number of additional formal and semantic properties with their Romance counterparts.

34 See Chapter 3 for a much more detailed presentation of such analyses.

35 A number of authors have, in fact, already analyzed Slavic subjunctives in similar terms, although usually in the context of individual Slavic languages, and not in the context of the Slavic language group as a whole, as I am doing here. See Antonenko (2008), Krapova (1998), Todorovic (2012) or Tomaszewicz (2012), among others.

58