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Entailments, Pragmatic Assertion And Mood In Spanish Complements, Errapel Mejías-Bikandi

Spanish Language and Literature

This paper examines a frequently overlooked class of expressions in Spanish that license the subjunctive mood in a complement clause. This class contains expressions such as poco/a/s “few”, menos de “less than” and solo “only”. The goal of the paper is to offer an account of the use of mood with these expressions that incorporates the data under discussion into previous pragmatic accounts of mood based on notions of assertion and informative value. The paper first offers a semantic characterization of this class of expressions that is based on their monotonic properties (Ladusaw 1980, Ladusaw 1983). Next, it explores the …