Governor-driven subjunctive selection: a variationist study from Latin to Romance

A key parameter to measure (dis)continuity between Romance languages and the ancestor language, Latin, is mood selection, especially the use of the subjunctive as opposed to the indicative according to syntactic environments and semantic meanings supposedly conveyed. This study explores the trajectory of mood selection in that-completive clauses from Latin to modern Romance languages, with a particular focus on Italian. It challenges the assumption that subjunctive selection is semantically motivated, highlighting recent variationist findings that identify the main clause verb’s lexical identity as the subjunctive’s major predictor. By employing a variationist sociolinguistic approach, this research delineates the evolution of subjunctive selection, revealing that contemporary patterns in Romance languages may reflect a continuation of lexicalization processes initiated in Vulgar Latin, rather than a recent desemanticization phenomenon. This analysis contributes a nuanced understanding of subjunctive selection, offering new perspectives on its function and evolution across Romance languages.