Balkan Subjunctive Distribution: World Semantics and Default Selection

Subjunctive complements in Balkan languages (e.g. Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian) distribute along a very wide range of embedded syntactic environments, because they are selected both by control and by non-control predicates. Such a wide distribution results in a great degree of semantic diversity associated with Balkan subjunctive (BlkS) in general, which makes it difficult to provide a coherent and unified theoretical account of this mood category. The analysis of BlkS I proposed in the paper focused on the selection mechanism whereby subjunctive complements are introduced into the structure, and the way in which the latter differs from indicative selection. I argued, based on Farkas (1992), that indicatives are selected by predicates which contain a specific mood feature, defined as the World feature, whereas subjunctives are selected in the absence of this feature, i.e. by default. This analysis allowed me to account for the lexical diversity of subjunctive-selecting predicates in Balkan languages, as well as for the formal and semantic contrasts that can be noted between various types of BlkS complements.