Mood and Assertion

Object of this study is the analysis of the Indicative and Subjunctive morphological mood marking, with special reference to Italian. I claim that the occurrence of these moods triggers a presupposition of assertibility and non-assertibility of the clauses that contain them: a clause counts as assertible just in case it leads to an effective elimination of possible worlds from the input context it gets added to. I show how these considerations can correctly account for the interpretation of hypothetical statements (indicative and counterfactual conditionals), and for the phenomenon of mood alternation in the domain of subordinated clauses.

Autorentext

Francesca Panzeri is a Researcher in Philosophy of Language at the Department of Psychology of the University of Milan-Bicocca. Her research focuses in the Semantics/Pragmatics interface.