1 Mood selection in complement clauses * Enikő Tóth University of Debrecen teniko@delfin.klte.hu 1. Introduction The purpose of the present paper is to investigate mood choice and mood variation in complement clauses in Hungarian and to argue that semantic factors play a crucial role in mood selection. Traditionally the notion of mood is restricted to a category expressed in verbal morphology; as Palmer (1986) observes, mood is formally a morphosyntactic category of the verb, but it has certain semantic functions that affect the meaning of the whole sentence. It has also been widely acknowledged in the literature that the meaning of the matrix predicate plays an important part in determining the mood of the complement clause. The present analysis is aimed at exploring various semantic parameters related to the embedding predicate that may have an effect upon mood choice in complement clauses. However, the discussion is restricted to the indicative and non-indicative opposition in complement clauses, and thus I will not attempt to characterize the difference between the conditional and the subjunctive or the imperative; the latter moods are subsumed under the label “non-indicative”. The discussion is organized as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of mood choice in Hungarian complement clauses and raises two fundamental questions related to mood phenomena in general, namely (i) what kinds of factors influence mood choice in complement clauses? (ii) what is the role of matrix negation? Section 3 presents a potential answer by proposing an account based on the semantic notion of veridicality in a Stalnakerian framework (Giannakidou, 1998). However, the study of veridicality still leaves certain questions about mood variation in complement clauses unanswered, for instance mood choice under epistemic predicates is not accounted for. For that reason epistemics are analyzed in detail in section 4. Section 5 then reexamines the open problems and explores a possible analysis in terms of Kratzer’s theory of modality (Kratzer 1981, 1991) and its adoption to mood choice by Giorgi & Pianesi (1997). Section 6 summarizes the findings of the article by arguing that semantic factors indeed are crucial to understanding mood distribution in Hungarian complement clauses. 2. The phenomenon Research on mood traditionally focuses on the selection of finite verb forms in complement clauses depending on various features of the embedding predicate. Hence, in order to study mood distribution in Hungarian I had to classify matrix predicates taking into account their semantic characteristics and then examine the mood selection properties of the emerging classes. The classification of predicates * I am indebted to Péter Pelyvás, László Hunyadi and Tamás Mihálydeák for extensive discussions on the issues raised in this paper. I also would like to thank Csilla Rákosi, György Rákosi, Stephen Grimes and the audience of ICSH7 for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for useful remarks on a previous version of the paper. Any errors are mine responsibility alone.