Predicting verbal mood in complement clauses: the role of the <em>semantic category</em>, the <em>tense</em> and the <em>grammatical aspect</em> of the matrix verb

Abstract

This study deals with the issue of mood choice in complement clauses in French, in which speakers may choose between the indicative or the subjunctive. We report on the results of two experiments using an elicitation task, in which we investigated how the matrix verb, via its distributive patterns (i.e. verbs selecting only the subjunctive vs. only the indicative vs. verbs accepting either mood), tense and grammatical aspect influences mood choice in the complement clause. While the role of the semantics of the matrix verb has been extensively studied in semantic studies, considering its tense and its grammatical aspect is a novel approach to explaining mood choice. Our experiments confirm that mood choice depends on the distributive patterns of the matrix verb: there are verbs selecting only the indicative (e.g. constater ‘notice’), verbs selecting only the subjunctive (e.g. apprécier ‘appreciate’) and verbs which allow both the indicative and the subjunctive, called alternance verbs (e.g. rêver ‘dream’). Crucially, our results reveal important interactions between the matrix verbs’ distributive patterns and their tense, as well as with their grammatical aspect. Specifically, both alternance verbs and subjunctive verbs undergo the influence of tense but the direction of the effect is different for each of these categories. In contrast to alternance and subjunctive verbs, verbs selecting the indicative are not influenced by tense and aspect. At a general level, our experimental study opens a new path towards enriching our knowledge about what factors play a significant role for mood choice in complement clauses and reveals that the polysemy of certain verbs strongly affects their selection of the subjunctive or of the indicative.