Lexical structure and subjunctive selection

Abstract This chapter investigates the licensing of subjunctive morphology in complement clauses in French, Modern Greek, Hungarian, and Polish. On the basis of the literature and evidence from so-called alternating verbs, the authors argue that matrix predicates which are emotive license embedded subjunctive. This is straightforward for emotive predicates like volitionals, but emotive factive predicates, as is well known, display more crosslinguistic variation. The authors propose, based on their previous work on extraction and the internal structure of the complementizer, that factive complementizers block the licensing of embedded subjunctive, which is typical across the languages considered here. Emotive factive verbs in French are exceptional in licensing embedded subjunctive, which according to the authors’ account is because the relevant factivity features are lexicalized directly on the matrix verb itself and not on the complementizer. The authors also suggest the existence of at least two emotivity features. Among other things, this allows them to view Hungarian hogy as a kind of syncretic indicative/subjunctive complementizer, comparable to the complementizer systems of Modern Greek and Polish.