Chapter 9 The linguistic marking of (ir)realis and subjunctive Caterina Mauri and Andrea Sansò 9.1 Introduction 1 The aim of this chapter is to discuss the morphosyntactic and distributional properties of subjunctive and irrealis, with a special focus on their mutual relation. We will address the topic from a terminological, typological, and diachronic perspective, illustrating the most inluential approaches to these two grammatical entities and presenting some new insights into their phenomenology. Subjunctive and irrealis will be used throughout this chapter to refer to linguistic forms. We should remark, however, that the notions of irrealis and realis in particular also refer to meaning categories, i.e. to two opposite values of a functional domain which is not coextensive with modality. Indeed, some authors speak of “reality status” (or “sta- tus”) as a fully-ledged grammatical category, realized diferently in diferent languages, with at least two values: realis (or neutral) and irrealis (e.g. Foley and Van Valin 1984; Van Valin and La Polla 1997: 40f.; Elliott 2000: 80; see also Chapter 5). Although it is not our aim to discuss the plausibility and appropriateness of a meaning category (ir)realis in this chapter, it should be mentioned that many criticisms have been leveled against “real- ity status” as an independent grammatical category, mostly based on the argument that “lack of reality” is not the relevant dimension explaining why there is shared coding of the various sub-functions for which an irrealis marker may be used in a given language (Bybee 1998; de Haan 2012; Cristofaro 2012a; Mauri and Sansò 2012a, 2012b). 1 his paper is the result of joint work by the two authors. Caterina Mauri has written Sections 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3.1; Andrea Sansò has written Sections 9.3.2, 9.4, and 9.5. Johan van der Auwera and Jan Nuyts read and commented on an earlier version of this chapter and were very helpful in improving the argumentation and the presentation of data. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Feb 12 2016, NEWGEN __10.4.1.57_Acad_US_UK_Acad_UK_Auwera140715OUK_PC_MANUSCRIPT_12_First_proofs_First_proofs_Production_Appln_Book.indb 166 3/7/2016 5:44:55 PM