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Prescriptively or descriptively speaking?

2021; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1075/prag.19044.fau

2406-4238

Tris Faulkner,

Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

Abstract It is generally put forth that Spanish has the subjunctive as the required mood in the complements of emotive-factives ( alegrarse de que ‘to be happy that’), desire verbs ( querer ‘to want’), verbs of uncertainty ( dudar ‘to doubt’), modals ( ser posible que ‘to be possible that’), causatives ( hacer que ‘to make that’), and directives ( recomendar que ‘to recommend that’) (e.g., Real Academia Española 2011 ). However, in spite of these traditional rules, it has been observed that some of these environments allow for the indicative ( Blake 1981 ; Crespo del Río 2014 ; Deshors and Waltermire 2019 ; Gallego and Alonso-Marks 2014 ; García and Terrell 1977 ; Gregory and Lunn 2012 ; Kowal 2007 ; Lipski 1978 ; Silva-Corvalán 1994 ; Waltermire 2019). The current study explored one such environment; emotive-factive clauses. Results showed that the presuppositions that speakers hold regarding the knowledge that their addressees possess influence the mood that they select. This, thus, demonstrates the important role that pragmatics plays in the occurrence of mood variation.