Some Unresolved Issues in Spanish Mood Use

Spanish mood has traditionally been taught through a framework of categorical rules. However, for some years now there have been efforts to find empirical data to clarify the exact nature of certain rules and to better understand the patterns of rule variability that exist outside the classroom. At some stage of study it is useful for instructors to provide feedback to students concerning those mood use issues which are still not fully resolved or fully explored in terms of actual usage. Issues examined here include the intersection of mood with notions like habituality, general truths and shared knowledge-as well as mood use in certain linguistic contexts entailing quasi-dubitatives, and dubitatives with double embedding. Empirical data for this study comes from two border varieties of Spanish.