Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Manifestation of the emotivity feature in Hexagonal French and Quebec French: theory and experimentation

                        Lena Baunaz (Université Côte d’Azur, UMR 7320 : Base, Corpus, Langage)

                        Joanna Blochowiak (Université de Louvain la Neuve)

                        Cristina Grisot (Université de Zürich)

The licensing of subjunctive mood is still a debated question (Baunaz & Puskás 2022; Grisot, Blochowiak & Puskás 2022). A recent approach sheds light on the importance of emotive contexts in the selection of subjunctive mood cross-linguistically (Baunaz & Puskás 2022, Baunaz & Lander to appear). Based on the syntactic and semantic differences of mood alternating verbs, these authors observed that mood alternation comes with a systematic difference in meaning. Their hypothesis is that subjunctive is triggered by an emotive feature, which is activated in emotive environments. In this empirical research we verify experimentally this hypothesis for Hexagonal French with an elicitation experiment, in which we asked participants to conjugate embedded verbs in two types of contexts: (i) an emotive context and (ii) a non-emotive context. Our prediction is that with alternating verbs, emotive contexts will trigger the subjunctive mood, while non-emotive contexts will trigger the indicative mood. As a control condition, we used verbs that only select for indicative complements, and verbs that only require the subjunctive mood. Our results indicate that our hypothesis is verified, as subjunctive mood is used significantly more often in emotive contexts than in non-emotive contexts. In this talk, we also discuss the results of a similar experiment we conducted on Quebec French.