Explore the vast range of titles available.

French distinguishes between indicative vs. subjunctive markings morphologically, by showing mood on the embedded verb. Embedded subjunctive appears with specific (classes of) matrix predicates, like vouloir (want), while the indicative mood is found with others, such as dire (say). This suggests that the subjunctive is licensed lexically by specific classes of predicates. However, the existence of verbs like rêver (dream), which seem to accept both moods, poses a challenge to this idea and raises the question of the source of optional mood selection. A recent approach sheds light on the importance of emotive contexts in the selection of subjunctive mood cross-linguistically (Baunaz & Pusks 2022, Baunaz & Lander 2024). Our hypothesis is that in cases where mood selection is optional (i.e., with alternating verbs), the subjunctive mood is licensed by the presence of the [Emo] feature, which is activated in emotive contexts. Consequently, we predict for alternating verbs, that the emotive contexts will favor the subjunctive mood, whereas the non-emotive contexts will favor the indicative mood. In contrast, the context manipulation will not affect the mood selection patterns of verbs that exclusively select either the indicative or subjunctive mood. We provide an experimental confirmation of this claim.

French distinguishes between indicative vs. subjunctive markings morphologically, by showing mood on the embedded verb. Embedded subjunctive appears with specific (classes of) matrix predicates, like vouloir (want), while the indicative mood is found with others, such as dire (say). This suggests that the subjunctive is licensed lexically by specific classes of predicates. However, the existence of verbs like rêver (dream), which seem to accept both moods, poses a challenge to this idea and raises the question of the source of optional mood selection. A recent approach sheds light on the importance of emotive contexts in the selection of subjunctive mood cross-linguistically (Baunaz & Pusks 2022, Baunaz & Lander 2024). Our hypothesis is that in cases where mood selection is optional (i.e., with alternating verbs), the subjunctive mood is licensed by the presence of the [Emo] feature, which is activated in emotive contexts. Consequently, we predict for alternating verbs, that the emotive contexts will favor the subjunctive mood, whereas the non-emotive contexts will favor the indicative mood. In contrast, the context manipulation will not affect the mood selection patterns of verbs that exclusively select either the indicative or subjunctive mood. We provide an experimental confirmation of this claim.

The acquisition of the Spanish morpheme se has proved to be problematic for L2 learners both because of its polyfunctionality and because of the restrictions regarding the types of predicates with which it can combine. This paper sheds light on this problem by focusing on a specific type of se (anticausative se ; e.g., El jarrón se rompió ‘The vase broke’) and exploring its acquisition across four proficiency levels. Results of a scalar grammaticality judgment task indicate that lower-proficiency participants’ performance is in line with previous research, which claims that this aspect of Spanish grammar is particularly challenging for L2 learners (as reflected in omission and overgeneralization errors). However, the near-native group shows sensitivity to the abstract features that uniquely characterize verbs that undergo the causative/inchoative alternation. Thus, the current findings suggest that L2 learners manage to overcome the problems experienced at lower levels and, in fact, do succeed at the level of ultimate attainment.

We introduce the safe recursive set functions based on a Bellantoni-Cook style subclass of the primitive recursive set functions. We show that the functions computed by safe recursive set functions under a list encoding of finite strings by hereditarily finite sets are exactly the polynomial growth rate functions computed by alternating exponential time Turing machines with polynomially many alternations. We also show that the functions computed by safe recursive set functions under a more efficient binary tree encoding of finite strings by hereditarily finite sets are exactly the quasipolynomial growth rate functions computed by alternating quasipolynomial time Turing machines with polylogarithmic many alternations. We characterize the safe recursive set functions on arbitrary sets in definability-theoretic terms. In its strongest form, we show that a function on arbitrary sets is safe recursive if and only if it is uniformly definable in some polynomial level of a refinement of Jensen's J-hierarchy, relativized to the transitive closure of the function's arguments. We observe that safe recursive set functions on infinite binary strings are equivalent to functions computed by infinite-time Turing machines in time less than ωω. We also give a machine model for safe recursive set functions which is based on set-indexed parallel processors and the natural bound on running times.