Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
closed access
In Italian complement clauses, the use of subjunctives can often alternate with the use of indicatives. While the phenomenon is well documented in the literature, little is known about the...Show moreIn Italian complement clauses, the use of subjunctives can often alternate with the use of indicatives. While the phenomenon is well documented in the literature, little is known about the mechanisms operating behind mood selection in choice contexts. It is consensus that subjunctive choice is triggered by both language internal and sociolinguistic factors. Multiple studies have suggested that the power of each language internal factor to predict subjunctive choice is not stable across different sociolinguistic varieties. However, this has never been object of investigation, and the value that speakers attribute to subjunctives in different sociolinguistic varieties remains a confused matter. The aim of this thesis is to provide an overarching understanding of the function that speakers’ attribute to subjunctives in complement clauses across different diaphasic and diachronic varieties of Italian. A corpus study was carried out in order to gain insight into this issue. This research is conducted following the probabilistic grammar framework (Bresnan 2007), which investigates cross-lectal changes in the probabilistic constraints shaping linguistic variation through the usage of multifactorial statistical techniques. The results of this corpus study indicate that subjunctive selection in Italian responds to slightly different mechanisms in different sociolinguistic varieties. This is particularly evident from a diachronic point of view, as subjunctives in Italian are nowadays correlating with new semantic values with respect to the past.Show less
