Explaining the Subjunctive in factive contexts

Abstract

The occurrence of the Subjunctive mood in sentences describing facts is commonly seen as problematic, given the relation between Subjunctive and non-veridicality. One line that is explored in the literature to account for the Subjunctive in complement clauses of factive verbs is to link the occurrence of this mood in such contexts to gradability of the main clause’s predicate. However, such an account faces empirical problems, and is not extendable to other contexts where the Subjunctive occurs even if the sentence describes a fact of reality. This paper proposes an account for the occurrence of Subjunctive in different kinds of factive contexts, showing that in all such cases the reason for this mood to occur follows from the general condition that leads to the use of Subjunctive, though for different reasons. Gradability of the main predicate is, in fact, one of the factors that leads to the consideration of non-p worlds, and the Subjunctive, but not the only one. For other predicates, other semantic features lead to counterfactual reasoning. Concessive clauses are another factive context where Subjunctive occurs and allow a better understanding of what triggers the Subjunctive mood and what this formal sign indicates.

Keywords

• mood
• Subjunctive
• non-veridicality
• causality
• factivity