Subjunctive complements in Balkan languages: Problems of distribution

This paper deals with the subject of Balkan subjunctive mood (BlkS), specifically the distribution of subjunctive complements across different Balkan languages (e.g. Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian). These languages exhibit unusual distributional patterns in this context, because they introduce subjunctive complements under a wide range of predicates (both control and non-control verbs), which are more lexically diverse than the subjunctive-selecting verbs in non-Balkan languages. As a result, BlkS as such is associated with a diverse range of meanings, which cannot be subsumed under any of the cross-linguistic semantic definitions of the subjunctive that were previously proposed in the literature (e.g. irrealis, non-veridicality, intensionality). Nevertheless, the analysis proposed in this paper, which looks at BlkS through the prism of the syntax-semantics interface (as defined in Chomsky 1995), reaches a coherent theoretical account of BlkS distribution. All BlkS complements are subsumed under the same syntactic clause type, whereas the formal and semantic contrasts that they exhibit are analyzed as a result of different syntactic derivations observed with complements belonging to the subjunctive clause type, which can produce different structural outputs at the syntax-semantics interface, resulting in different types of interpretations.