Mood and modal anchoring in Spanish: de que clauses and relative clauses

On a classical analysis (Hintikka, 1969), attitude verbs denote modal operators that take propositions as arguments. Starting with Kratzer 2006, a new decompositional analysis has emerged on which (i) attitude verbs express properties of individuals/events, (ii) modality is introduced at the level of the embedded clause, and (iii) the modal domain is projected from one of the arguments of the embedding predicate (its ‘modal anchor’). Work on mood developed within this new analysis (Kratzer, 2016; Portner and Rubinstein, 2020) assumes that mood morphology is one of the possible sources of modality in the embedded clause. This paper provides novel evidence for the decompositional analysis. The evidence comes from the interpretation of mood morphology within DPs. We show that adnominal clauses and relative clauses in Spanish exhibit systematic interpretational differences. We argue that those differences trace back to the availability of modal anchors in each configuration.