Kalender Details

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago)

In this presentation— which relies on material from Giannakidou and Mari 2016, 2018a,b, in progress— we discuss the problem of mood selection in complement clauses in Greek and Italian. It is shown that the subjunctive mood depends on the availability of a doxastic nonveridical modal base in the lexical entry of the selecting predicate— i.e., a ‘do not know p’ component—  that can be triggered more freely in Italian resulting in a more flexible mood pattern than Greek. The ‘do not know’ component of doxastic predicates is shared with epistemic modals, which also come with a nonveridical modal base (and are therefore ‘weak’).  Factivity  presupposes knowledge of p, and should therefore be incompatible with the subjunctive, as is indeed the case. The veridicality of factivity can be overridden in some languages by an emotive modal base, which we think is also relevant for exclamatives.