Thematic organization of the study

Before I turn to Slavic subjunctive, I will first use the remainder of the introductory chapter to situate my approach within a broader theoretical context, first with regards to the overall conceptual framework that I will be assuming (1.3), and then with respect to other theoretical perspectives that were proposed in order to account for the cross-linguistic properties of the subjunctive mood (1.4). In Section 1.3, I will introduce the basic view of grammar that is assumed within the minimalist program, emphasizing those aspects of minimalism that will be of particular relevance for this study, specifically the minimalist take on syntax and its interfaces. In Section 1.4, I will focus more closely on the issues related to the subjunctive mood in particular, outlining a number of influential theoretical approaches that were proposed in order to account for the nature of the subjunctive, as well as some of the problems faced by such approaches, which will provide the motivation for the different theoretical angle that I will develop in the context of my analysis of the Slavic subjunctive later on.

After establishing the theoretical foundations for my study, I will move on, from Chapter 2 onwards, to the subject of Slavic subjunctive itself. Chapters 2-5 will focus on complements defined previously as Subj1, which are most relevant when it comes to the study of Slavic subjunctive, whereas issues related to Subj2 will be dealt with more briefly, and from a more cross-linguistic perspective, at the end of the dissertation in Chapter 6, given that we saw in (19-20) that this type of subjunctive is not as productive in Slavic as it is some other languages, particularly those belonging to the Romance group.¹²

In Chapter 2, I will look at the properties of the Slavic subjunctive mood from a more global perspective, as well as compare Slavic subjunctives with their Romance counterparts.

My major goal in this context will be to demonstrate that Slavic languages, despite the lack of dedicated verbal morphology for the subjunctive, nonetheless contain a group of complements

12 For terminological clarity, note that, from now on, whenever I employ the term ‘subjunctive’ or ‘subjunctive complement’ in a general sense, without further specification, I will be referring to complements previously defined as Subj1. Whenever I mention complements subsumed under the Subj2 label, I will do so explicitly.

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which can be subsumed under the subjunctive clause type, because they systematically differ from their indicative counterparts in Slavic, while exhibiting the bulk of the underlying formal and semantic clausal properties that are observed with Romance Subj1 complements. The main conclusion that I will reach in this context will be that, even though Slavic subjunctive cannot be seen as a verbal mood, it can be analyzed as a clausal mood (a notion that will be defined in more detail later on in 2.2).

The arguments that I will put forward in order to make the case for the existence of the subjunctive as a clausal mood in Slavic will lead me towards the first major syntactic claim that I will make in relation to subjunctive vs. indicative complementation, namely the claim that subjunctives and indicatives are syntactically introduced through two different CP-projections.

In Section 2.3, I will develop a formal account of these two types of CPs, which will analyze the differences pertaining to their internal structural make-up through the prism of the broader selection approach to subjunctive vs. indicative complementation that I just briefly introduced in the previous section (i.e. the idea that the indicative CP is selected as a marked embedded option whereas the subjunctive CP is selected by default). The formal analysis that will be proposed in this context will then be used to explain a series of syntactic and semantic contrasts that will be observed between indicative and subjunctive clauses, both in Slavic and cross-linguistically.

A closer examination of the subjunctive clause type that I will subsequently develop in 2.4 will show that the latter shares a cluster of common properties with matrix imperatives. As a result, both Subj1 complements and matrix imperatives will be claimed to be associated with the same type of CP, which is selected as a default option in embedded contexts. Once I hone in more closely on the formal properties of this CP, I will argue that the latter contains a hierarchical feature cluster consisting of a higher Dir(ective) feature, which performs a clause-typing function, and a lower modal Deo(ntic) feature, which encodes the type of modality that is typically observed with both matrix imperatives and embedded intensional subjunctives, i.e.

deontic modality. The formal and semantic differences between various Subj1 complements in different Slavic languages that will be observed in the subsequent parts of this dissertation will then be analyzed as a function of how much of this basic Subj1 CP clause structure is preserved in a given complement by the end of its syntactic derivation, and shipped to the semantic component, and how much of it is truncated during the derivation and hence inaccessible to semantics.

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Before focusing in more detail on a number of individual Slavic languages that will be of primary interest for this study (namely Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian and Russian), I will end the discussion in Chapter 2 by introducing an important typological distinction that can be observed within the Slavic linguistic family in general based on the realization and distribution of the subjunctive mood in different languages. In 2.6, we will see that Slavic languages can be roughly divided in two groups based on the properties of their subjunctive: Eastern and Western Slavic languages, on the one hand, which all realize their subjunctive similarly as Russian; and South Slavic, or Balkan Slavic languages, on the other, which are closer to non-Slavic Balkan languages, such as Greek, than they are to non-Balkan Slavic languages when it comes to the syntactic realization and distribution of their subjunctive complements. The main theoretical focus of the subsequent parts of this study will then be placed on Balkan Slavic languages, whereas the analysis of the subjunctive in Slavic languages outside of the Balkans (primarily Russian) will basically consist of applying and generalizing the theoretical conclusions that will have been reached on the basis of my study of the Balkan subjunctive. The reason why I chose to focus my analysis primarily on Balkan Slavic is due to the fact that Balkan languages (both Slavic and non-Slavic) present some specific theoretical problems for the analysis of the subjunctive, mainly because they exhibit unusual distributional patterns in relation to this mood, which are not typically observed in other languages.

Chapter 3, which will deal with Slavic languages of the Balkan region, will thus constitute the theoretical core of this dissertation. The analysis that I will put forward there will be primarily focused on Bulgarian, Croatian and Serbian, but I will often be making references to other, non-Slavic Balkan languages, such as Greek or Romanian, as well, because, as we will observe throughout that chapter, Balkan languages in general exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity when it comes to the properties of their subjunctive mood, despite belonging to several different language families.¹³ Section 3.1, which will primarily focus on the more typical intensional Subj1 complements, will provide a formal account of the morpho-syntactic realization of Balkan subjunctive, first from a broader perspective (3.1.1-3.1.2), and then in the context of Balkan Slavic (3.1.3-3.1.4) in more detail. In the remaining parts of Chapter 3, I will then widen the scope of the analysis beyond the typical intensional subjunctives in order to look at the distribution of subjunctive complements in Balkan languages in a more comprehensive manner.

13 The reason for this is the phenomenon called Balkan sprachbund (see 3.1 and 3.2 for more detail).

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Section 3.2 will introduce the issues related to Balkan subjunctive distribution from a more descriptive perspective, outlining the various syntactic environments where Balkan subjunctive can be found, as well as the problems that some of them pose for the analysis of the subjunctive. In this context, we will see that the verb groups that select Subj1 clauses are far greater in number in Balkan languages than they are in most other languages, because Balkan Subj1 complements are selected both by non-control and by control verbs, whereas subjunctive is generally not associated with (subject) control predicates from a cross-linguistic perspective.

Such wide distribution of the Balkan subjunctive will also be shown to result in a much greater degree of semantic diversity associated with the Balkan Subj1 clause type than the one we typically observe with its cross-linguistic counterparts, which will present a whole host of additional problems for the analysis of the subjunctive mood as such. This is the primary reason why, once again, the main theoretical focus of this dissertation will be placed on Balkan Slavic.

Section 3.3 will then propose an analysis that will address the problems related to Balkan subjunctive distribution. This section will represent the most important theoretical part of Chapter 3, as well as of the dissertation as a whole, because the generalizations I will propose there in order to account for the data related to Balkan subjunctive distribution will later on be applied to the Slavic subjunctive more generally. The main claims that will be made in 3.3 can be summarized as follows:

(i) All subjunctive complements selected by predicates that will be outlined in 3.2 constitute the same Subj1 clause type, despite the syntactic and the semantic diversity we will observe between them. This conclusion will be justified by showing that, despite their internal diversity, all of these subjunctive complements exhibit a cluster of common clausal properties that distinguish them from their indicative counterparts.

(ii) Subj1 clause structure, in its basic form, contains the subjunctive/imperative CP, with the C-head that consists of the Dir>Deo feature cluster I talked about earlier, as well as the lower modality layer, which consists of several projections that encode different types of modal meanings. The most important modal projections that I will be using in my analysis are those related to deontic modality- i.e. the type of modality that is used to indicate how the world should be, according to certain norms, expectations, desires etc.-, as well as dynamic modality, which is the type of modality most closely related to

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notions such as ability or capacity (derived from the Old Greek dynamai, ‘to be able’).¹⁴ Thus, the full structure underlying the subjunctive clause type, which will be relevant for my analysis in 3.3, corresponds to the (simplified) representation below:

(23) [CP CDir>Deo [ModPdeontic [ModPdynamic [TP [vP…]]]]]

(iii) The broader analysis of Subj1 selection as a default embedded option will imply that a number of predicates that select this clause type will not be semantically compatible with all the features contained within the basic Subj1 clause structure in (23). As a result, the projections which contain features that are incompatible with a given verb’s lexical make-up will be truncated by the time the syntactic derivation reaches the interface with semantics. This is where the property of structural permeability associated with the Subj1 clause type comes into play.

(iv) All the syntactic and semantic diversity that will be observed between various Balkan Subj1 complements will be accounted for by referring to the different degrees of truncation that the Subj1 clause structure in (23) undergoes before it reaches the syntax-semantics interface, depending on the lexical properties of the selecting predicate. Those complements that are associated with a larger structure by the time they reach the interface with semantics will be closer to the typical (i.e. intensional, irrealis) subjunctive meaning, because they send a greater number of subjunctive-related features to LF, whereas complements that are structurally smaller are also further removed from the typical subjunctive meaning because they send a smaller amount of these features to LF.

(v) Given that the basic semantic characteristics of every Balkan Subj1 complement can be determined by looking at how many projections associated with the subjunctive clause structure in (23) it maintains by the end of its syntactic derivation, the overall semantics related to Balkan Subj1 clause type as such can be analyzed in terms of a

14 Some authors, such as Palmer (1986), make a distinction between ‘deontic modality’, related to obligations, and

‘bouletic modality’, related to wishes. Here I will subsume both of the types of modal meanings under the ‘deontic’

category because they will be seen as closely related, both from a semantic and from a syntactic point of view.

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semantic continuum or scale, which I will call the subjunctivity scale (Socanac, 2012).¹⁵ One end of this scale is occupied by those complements that preserve the full structure in (23): they are complements selected by directive predicates (e.g. order, request, demand), which can be described as embedded imperatives. The other end of the subjunctivity scale is occupied by Subj1 complements that truncate the entire left periphery (including the modality layer) down to TP, and which contain no modal dimension to their meaning: they are complements selected by verbs such as aspectuals (e.g. begin, continue) or implicatives (e.g. manage, succeed, dare), some of which we already observed earlier on in (21-22). The semantic layers within the subjunctivity scale can be roughly summarized as in (24):

(24) Directivity > Deontic modality > Dynamic modality > vP-related semantics

All the claims outlined in (i)-(v) stem from my overall view of the subjunctive as a syntax-semantics interface phenomenon: once again, the semantic properties of a given Subj1 complement, and the position that the latter will occupy within the subjunctivity scale, crucially depend on its underlying structural make-up.

As I already hinted earlier on, the subsequent parts of the dissertation, in particular Chapter 4, will largely consist of applying the analysis that was proposed in the context of Balkan subjunctive to Slavic languages outside of the Balkans (primarily Russian), with the goal of determining whether the theoretical account developed in 3 is applicable to Slavic subjunctive as a whole. In the first part of Chapter 4 (Section 4.1), I will focus on the more typical intensional subjunctives in non-Balkan Slavic, showing that such complements can be subsumed under the same type of syntactic analysis as the one that was proposed in relation to their Balkan counterparts in 3.1. The second part of the chapter (Section 4.2) will then look at the issue of subjunctive distribution, which is the area where we will observe the greatest degree of divergence between Balkan and non-Balkan Slavic languages, because the latter do not introduce the subjunctives in control environments, but use the infinitives in this context.

Nevertheless, these infinitive complements will be shown to exhibit the bulk of the underlying formal and semantic clausal properties that we previously observed in relation to their

15 I borrowed the term ‘subjunctivity scale’ from the lecture on Serbo-Croatian subjunctive held by Boban Arsenijević at the Geneva University in 2012. Arsenijević used the term in a completely different context, though.

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subjunctive counterparts in Balkan languages, which will ultimately lead to the conclusion that both subjunctives and infinitives in non-Balkan Slavic languages can be subsumed under the same Subj1 clause type as Balkan subjunctives. This conclusion will be further reinforced by introducing a range of cross-linguistic data, pertaining both to Slavic and to non-Slavic languages, which will demonstrate that infinitives and subjunctives in general are very close and often interchangeable categories.

In Chapter 5, I will provide a summary of the main theoretical generalizations that will have been reached on the basis of my study of the Slavic subjunctive by that point. All of these generalizations will pertain to Subj1-type complementation, which represents the bulk of subjunctive distribution in Slavic (and which, given the analysis in 4.2, will be claimed to subsume both subjunctives and infinitives). In Chapter 6, on the other hand, I will put forward a shorter and somewhat more tentative theoretical account in relation to the group of complements previously defined as Subj2, which are more prominent in Romance than they are in Slavic languages. The main claim that will be made there is that Subj2 clauses involve indicative-type syntactic complementation, where subjunctive morphological marking is introduced under an indicative CP. This analysis will be backed up by showing that Subj2 complements pattern more closely with indicatives than they do with Subj1 complements when it comes to their formal and semantic clausal properties. Finally, Chapter 7 will wrap up the dissertation and suggest some avenues for future research.