A sentence mood account for Spanish verum

Abstract

This article argues in favor of the idea that verum can result from focus marking on sentence mood. The empirical base are verum strategies in Spanish, English and German. It is shown that all of them result from stress on sentence mood, even though the strategies to express verum in the three languages appear unrelated on a superficial level: German and English rely on stress on a finite verb, Spanish inserts a particle. In the article, a semantic and syntactic account complete each other. The semantic approach is a revised version of Lohnstein’s sentence mood theory of verum focus. The effect of verum in different sentence moods is derived by the function each mood has and the alternatives that focus on them generates. The syntactic analysis is modeled in a cartographic framework (Rizzi 1997 et seq.) and motivates a projection in the lower section of the left periphery dedicated to sentence mood. A focus feature in this projection results in the verum interpretation of the proposition. The principal argument developed in this article is that the superficial differences across languages and clause types result from the fact that the focused mood feature is checked in different configurations.