In the Romance languages, many syntactic contexts, especially in subordinate clauses, require a subjunctive mood on the verb, not leaving any romm for mood choice. In other contexts, however, there is a choice between subjunctive and indicative depending on the semantics a speaker may want to convey. I'm interested in research on the statistics of these two types. What is the percentage of syntactically triggered vs. modal subjunctive use in Spanish (or other Romance languages)? What are the percentages in the written language as opposed to spontaneous spoken discourse? Is there published research on this? On what criteria could such a statistical analysis be based, given that there is an important intermediate group of cases, where many speakers might already consider the subjunctive obligatory while others might still see some room for variation?

More Hans-Ingo Radatz's questions See All
Similar questions and discussions