Philippe Schlenker. “The Lazy (French)man’s Approach to the Subjunctive (Reference to Worlds, Presuppositions and Semantic Defaults in the Analysis of Mood: Some Preliminary Remarks)”, first draft, UCLA & IJN (last modified: June 10, 2004; new title, no other modifications for the moment).
bq. Abstract: It has proven rather difficult to provide a unified semantics for the French subjunctive (the difficulty applies more generally to Romance, but we concentrate on French). In this preliminary note, we suggest that this is because the French subjunctive is a semantic default, to be used just in case the indicative would have triggered a presupposition failure. Thus the environments in which the subjunctive appears do not form a natural class, although they are the complement of a natural class. Once this is established, a large part of the question becomes: what is the semantic contribution of the indicative? Modifying minimally the analysis of Stalnaker 1975 (which was concerned with English), we suggest that the indicative triggers a presupposition on the value of a world term w, of the form w{CS(x’, t’, w’)}, indicating that the world denoted by w lies in the Context Set of individual x’ at time t’ in world w’ (x’, t’, and w’ may be left free — if the context provides them with a salient value — or they may be bound). This derives indirectly the intuition, found both in traditional grammar and in recent research (e.g. Farkas 2003), that the indicative marks an assertive act on somebody’s part, though this person need not be the speaker. We also discuss an extension of this theory to the German Konjunktiv I, which we analyze in essence as a reportive indicative, in line with the intuitions though not with the implementation of Fabricius-Hansen & Saebø 2004. If correct, the theory we sketch makes it possible to analyze mood by analogy with person and tense as introducing a presupposition on the value of word-denoting terms, and in particular on world-denoting variables.
[1]
I would like to hear from the German native speakers whether they agree or not to the following statements from Schlenker’s paper:
This suggests that the Konjunktiv 1 is -despite its name- an indicative, though with the special
requirement that the Context Set it refers to should not be that of the actual speaker at the time and in the
world of his utterance. We also obtain in this way the observation that the Konjunktiv I cannot occur in
conditionals, since the Context Set which is relevant for conditionals is always that of the speaker at the
time and in the world of utterance.
Do you agree with the indicative analysis of the Konjuctiv 1?
[2]
June 15th, 2004, at 9:10 am #I have taken the liberty to post a link to this entry in my blog.
I agree with the data Philippe reports. The analysis itself is a matter of theory-internal considerations, which I am not prepared to give a verdict on at this time. But he’s right about the facts, and that’s all that a native speaker should be called upon to judge qua native speaker.
June 15th, 2004, at 5:35 pm #Let me put some examples in Portuguese and then I make my question:
[I] With the Subjunctive
(a) *Acho que a Maria esteja doente.
I suppose/ guess that Mary is sick.
(b) ?Penso que a Maria esteja doente. (depends on the pragmatic context to be accepted or not)
I think that Mary is sick.
(c) Acredito que a Maria esteja doente.
I believe that Mary is sick.
[II] -Negative root clause + Subjunctive Present
(a) Não acho que a Maria esteja doente.
I do not suppose/ guess that Mary is sick.
The rest is ok too.
[II] With the indicative
All versions ok.
In [I] above we see that the acceptability firstly may depend on the verb of the root clause. Would the judgements vary if for instance you changed the examples, using ‘zu denken’, ‘zu schätzen’, ‘zu annehmen’ etc? (Sorry, I do not recall the right form to quote German verbs).
June 15th, 2004, at 9:28 pm #No. None of these verbs can take a Konjunktiv I complement if they are 1st person presents:
*Ich denke/ich nehme an/ich schätze, daß Maria krank sei.
These need to be indicative:
Ich denke/ich nehme an/ich schätze, daß Maria krank ist.
June 15th, 2004, at 11:09 pm #So the basic difference in this regard is that, while in Portuguese the restriction on the use of the Subjunctive depends on the verb, in German you have an ‘absolute’ restriction on the Konjunktiv1. But in both cases the Indicative is a possibility. This indicates that the Konjunktiv1 behaves more like the Subjunctive in Portuguese. Of course, to state the contrary on has to appeal to ‘theory-internal’ arguments, as you said.
But, do we really need to reduce the number of moods to only Indicative and Subjunctive?
June 16th, 2004, at 12:34 pm #We are having a nice conversation on the English subjunctive issue. I hereby invite you all to come here.
July 1st, 2004, at 11:32 pm #