Mood in factive contexts: Evidence from European Portuguese

A traditional spread idea concerning mood in Romance languages is that Subjunctive is the mood of irrealis, Indicative occurring in sentences describing reality. This idea faces different problems, Giannakidou’s work on non-veridicality having been a major step towards the comprehension of what rules mood choice. However, the reason for the mood that occurs in different kinds of sentences describing facts is still to be fully understood. Basing on data from European Portuguese, this paper proposes an analysis of such contexts, showing that the conditions that rule mood choice explain the mood selected in factive and non-factive contexts.