Spanish Subjunctive Clauses Require Ordered Alternatives

This paper examines the semantic properties of the subjunctive mood in Spanish. My main goal here is to argue for a new semantics of the verbs that select subjunctive mood in their complement clause, based on an alternative semantics. I propose the hypothesis that Spanish subjunctive clauses require contexts that make ordered alternatives available. Whether the verb of an embedded clause is in the indicative or the subjunctive mood is determined by the matrix verb. The indicative mood is selected by epistemic verbs (e.g . , know, think, believe), declarative verbs (e.g . , say, write, declare), predicates of certainty (e.g . , be sure, be convinced) , comissives (e .g . , promise) , and fiction verbs (e.g. , dream, imagine ) . 1 A few examples are presented in ( 1 ) through (4) .