Beschreibung:
Abstract: The dissertation examines the perception, usage and productivity of the Italian subjunctive, a morphological system inherited from Latin that, according to traditional accounts, encodes irrealis, non-declarative, non-factual or subjective utterances. Nowadays the subjunctive usually alternates with the indicative and the conditional mood in embedded clauses. This morphological variation raises the hypothesis that it has progressively lost semantic and grammatical meaning from Latin to the Romance languages and that it is no longer productive. These issues are investigated by reviewing its functions and statistics of occurrence in samples of Latin and by comparing them to present-day Italian. Additionally, a corpus study of its use in Italian is conducted. The contrastive analyses show that in Latin it was mainly employed as a syntactic marker of subordination. However, its frequency in relation to other mood forms has dramatically decreased over the course of the centuries. The results of the corpus study reveal that nowadays the large majority of subjunctive forms occur with a few high-frequency verbs. Also, only two governor verbs systematically select it in speech. This evidence suggests that it has low productivity and that it has been routinized in a few formulaic phrases. Finally, the productivity of different forms of the subjunctive paradigm is tested by means of an oral production experiment. The experiment additionally looks at the mechanisms that drive morphological productivity by asking participants to derive subjunctive and infinitive forms of novel verbs. The results show that both type and token frequency of the morphological pattern boost its productivity