Commitment in Mood and Modality
This paper develops an account of mood selection with attitude predicates in French. I start by examining the "contextual commitment" approach to mood developed inwork by Paul Portner andAynat Rubinstein. I raise empirical and theoretical challenges for P/R's analysis of contextual commitment and its role in P/R's explanations of mood selection, as well as of broader phenomena like the weak/strong necessity modal distinction. There are indicativeselecting verbs that can be felicitous in contexts where there isn't contextual commitment (in P/R's sense) and there are subjunctive selecting verbs that involve no less contextual commitment (in P/R's sense) than certain indicativeselecting verbs. I then propose an alternative account of mood selection in French. The guiding idea is to analyze mood in terms of a relation between a predicate'smodal backgrounds and a relevant overall state ofmind. Indicativeselecting attitude predicates "presuppose commitment" in the sense of presupposing that the predicate's modal backgrounds are entailed by the modal backgrounds representing the attitude state formally, that the preordered set fP(x,w),gP(x,w) determined by the predicate's semantics is included in the preordered set (CSl,l) representing the local context introduced by the predicate. This account provides an improved explanation of various puzzling mood selection phenomena. These phenomena include subjunctive selection with emotive factives, indicative selectionwith fiction verbs, indicative selection with esperer 'hope' versus subjunctive selectionwith vouloir 'want' and indicativeselection with commissives versus subjunctive selection with directives. The mood selection properties of these predicates can be derived from the proposed semantics of mood, independently motivated features of the predicates' semantics, and general principles of interpretation.