The subjunctive in subordinate clauses in Old Italian

This paper has carried out a corpus-based investigation of subjunctive in Old Italian texts. Following modern generative syntactic theories we have distinguished two types of subjunctive: intensional (and subtypes thereof: volitive, epistemic and factive) and polar. We have documented the extent and variation of occurrences of subjunctive: a) governed by lexical categories: verbs, nouns, and adjectives (intensional); b) in the syntactic domain of selected operators such as negation(polar). On the basis of data extracted from the corpus we observed two main generalizations. The first is distributional: in Old Italian the subjunctive mood could appear in fewer context types than in Modern Italian(although the token frequency for a given type can be even very high). The second is interpretive: in Old Italian subjunctive expressed semantic dependency much more than it does today. Evidence for this is given by the almost complete absence of subjunctive in factive contexts(where in Modern Italian it can freely alternate with indicative basically without meaning difference, thus working as a pure marker of syntactic subordination) and the rich array of polar subjunctive(which are semantically licensed in a way similar to negative polarity items).