“Mood Swings” in European Portuguese: the Indicative vs. the Subjunctive in Clausal Complementation

This is a corpus-based investigation on the semantic motivations for the use of the indicative and subjunctive in European Portuguese’s complementation clauses. It is argued that the moods are conceptual tools that reflect how a clause is grounded (cf. e.g. Langacker 2009: Ch. 9). The indicative reflects a manifest compatibility between the clause's profile (the specific set of circumstances it designates) and its epistemic base (the conception of reality it is related to). The subjunctive, conversely, reflects an attenuated compatibility. A "mood swing" will then be accompanied by a considerable change in the meaning of the sentence. The major novelty of these claims consists in proposing that the subjunctive can be bound under this notion of attenuated compatibility.

A clause’s profile can have an attenuated compatibility with its base because:

(1) the speaker instructs the hearer to consider it so, which happens in complementation cases introduced by epistemic CTEs (complement taking elements) with a value of doubt or disbelief, such as duvidar (‘doubt’) or impossível ('impossible');

(2) there are motivations to contrast that compatibility with similar contexts, such as when using certo (‘certain’) without and with modifiers, as in it is certain that... + IND vs. it is almost certain that... + SUBJ;

(3) that compatibility is not profiled at all, as in the complement clauses introduced by CTEs of influence (querer ‘want’; deixar ‘let’, ‘allow’) or evaluation (lamentar ‘regret’; bom ‘good’; mau ‘bad’).

Important in establishing these claims were, therefore, the CTEs, as they provide the domain as to which the complement is to be analysed (epistemic and non-epistemic, the latter divided into influence and evaluation).

Particularly in what epistemic contexts are concerned, the effect that a negation marker in the matrix may have was also relevant: it is capable of turning a positive context (I think that...) into a negative one (I don't think that... = I doubt that…), i.e. a context of compatibility into an attenuated one. In non-epistemic cases, mainly on influence ones, the presence of modal verbs in the complement were also seen to play an important role in facilitating a mood change, being that they can bring epistemic features to the clause. By comparing 'I recommend that the house be sold' with 'I recommend that the house must be sold', it can be seen that while the former describes the actions that the interlocutor is to perform, the latter describes the speaker's convictions. The latter is systematically found with indicative complements whereas the former with subjunctive ones. Mood alternations could also be found in evaluation contexts — whose complements regularly take subjunctive forms — when followed by a reported speech complement (epistemic action). In these cases, the indicative is regularly selected.