37.3169, Reviews: Mood Alternations: Raquel Montero Estebaranz (2026)

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Subject: 37.3169, Reviews: Mood Alternations: Raquel Montero Estebaranz (2026)

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Date: 02-Oct-2026
From: Jose Benavides [josbenav at iu.edu]
Subject: Syntax: Raquel Montero Estebaranz (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-1473

Title: Mood Alternations
Subtitle: A synchronic and diachronic study of negated complement
clauses in Spanish
Series Title: Open Romance Linguistics
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/582

Author(s): Raquel Montero Estebaranz

Reviewer: Jose Benavides

SUMMARY
Raquel Montero Estebaranz’s “Mood alternations: A synchronic and
diachronic study of negated complement clauses in Spanish” is a
revised doctoral dissertation that reconstructs the history of
polarity mood (PM) in Peninsular Spanish from the thirteenth to the
twentieth century. PM is the alternation between indicative and
subjunctive morphology in complement clauses selected by negated
matrix predicates that ordinarily take the indicative in affirmative
clauses. The book asks how this alternation developed and whether one
diachronic account can explain five properties of the modern system:
matrix verb class, the first-person present effect, negative
imperatives, information status, and strong negative polarity items
(NPIs). It combines formal syntax and semantics with historical corpus
analysis, statistical modeling, and computational simulation. Its
eight chapters are aimed primarily at researchers and advanced
graduate students in Romance linguistics, historical syntax, formal
semantics, language acquisition, and language change.
Chapter 1, ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–28), distinguishes modality from
grammatical mood and intensional mood (IM), selected by a lexical
predicate, from polarity mood, licensed under negation. Thus,
affirmative “querer” ‘want’ requires a subjunctive complement, whereas
“saber” ‘know’ requires an indicative one, but negated “saber” permits
both. The Romance comparison shows that mood selection is not uniform,
while the historical data show that it is not fixed. In Old Spanish,
affirmative “creer” ‘believe’ and “prometer” ‘promise’ could occur
with either mood, “esperar” ‘hope’ frequently took the indicative, and
emotive-factive predicates selected the indicative more often than
they do today. The chapter then identifies five properties that
constrain PM in modern Peninsular Spanish. With semi-factive
predicates such as “saber”, an indicative complement tends to convey
speaker commitment to the embedded proposition, whereas the
subjunctive lacks that implication (Montero & Romero 2023). A
first-person present matrix predicate makes the indicative markedly
less acceptable, though not impossible in every discourse. Negative
imperatives show the reverse restriction: “No creas que el dinero
crece” ‘Do not think that money grows on trees’ requires an indicative
complement. New information gives the indicative a small advantage,
while a strong NPI in the embedded clause degrades it. The absence of
a systematic diachronic account of these interacting effects motivates
the study.
Chapter 2, ‘Theories of polarity mood’ (pp. 29–42), evaluates three
prominent synchronic approaches. Presuppositional accounts associate
the indicative with speaker commitment and explain the first-person
effect, but not the verb-class contrast or the indicative requirement
in negative imperatives (Rivero 1971; Quer 1998). Neg-raising and
focus accounts connect the subjunctive with a low interpretation of
negation and help explain strong NPI licensing. Corpus examples and
experimental findings, however, show that Neg-raising inferences can
occur with either mood, while the subjunctive can appear when such an
inference is unavailable (Montero, Doroski & Romero 2025).
Information-status accounts relate the indicative to new or
contrastive material and the subjunctive to old information, but the
experimental difference is small and leaves the remaining constraints
unexplained (Faulkner 2021). None of the three accounts covers the
full distribution.
Chapter 3, ‘Insights from Intensional Mood’ (pp. 43–69), asks whether
theories of lexical mood selection can fill those gaps. Syntactic
proposals treat the subjunctive as a marker of close subordination or
as the clausal counterpart of a genitive or dependent case. The
parallels are suggestive, particularly between polarity subjunctive
and the Genitive of Negation, but the distributions and
grammaticalization paths do not coincide. The optional-polarity and
obligatory-intensional pattern found in Romance, for instance, is
absent from the Baltic and Slavic case systems surveyed. Semantic
proposals are also incomplete. An ordering-source analysis has
difficulty with commissive and non-assertive predicates, while
Schlenker’s (2005) referential analysis treats the indicative as
presupposing that the evaluation world belongs to an accessible
Context Set (CS) and the subjunctive as a presuppositionless default.
This covers much of the distribution but requires additional
assumptions for volitional, fictional, and negated non-factive
predicates. The chapter leaves open the possibility that Spanish mood
involves both semantic and syntactic features, setting up the
competing-grammars analysis.
Chapter 4, ‘Towards a new theory of mood: The competing grammars
approach’ (pp. 71–95), develops the book’s central proposal. Drawing
on Kroch’s model of competing grammars, Yang’s Variational Learning,
and Wallenberg’s Variational Specialization, Montero Estebaranz
proposes three systems whose outputs overlap but whose licensing
mechanisms differ (Kroch 1989; Yang 2000; Wallenberg 2019). Grammar G0
treats mood as a hedging device: the subjunctive marks weaker
commitment than the indicative. Because medieval intuitions cannot be
recovered directly, present-day Bulgarian serves as a comparative
analogue rather than evidence that the two systems are identical
(Smirnova 2011). Grammar G1 is referential and semantic: the
indicative carries an accessibility presupposition, whereas the
subjunctive is the default. G2 is a grammaticalized syntactic system
in which mood is valued under negative polarity, by analogy with case
under negation. Chapter 4 presents G2 through an Agreement analysis;
Chapter 7 later considers dependent mood. On the proposed diachronic
account, G0 loses ground while G1 and G2 specialize: G1 becomes
dominant with semi-factives, whereas G2 increasingly favors the
subjunctive with negated non-factives.
Chapter 5, ‘Explaining Polarity Mood: The verb class effect’ (pp.
97–136), presents the principal corpus study. The initial dataset
comprises 12,133 sentences from the “Corpus del Diccionario histórico
de la lengua española” containing two semi-factive predicates, “saber”
‘know’ and “ver” ‘see’, and two non-factives, “creer” ‘believe’ and
“decir” ‘say’. Tokens are manually annotated for period, clause type,
matrix finiteness and mood, person and tense, embedded-clause
ambiguity, and embedded mood. After unsuitable cases are
removed—including interrogatives, nonfinite matrix predicates, matrix
subjunctives, and ambiguous “que/qué” clauses—5,064 declarative tokens
with an indicative or subjunctive embedded verb remain. Construction
FP contains a first-person present matrix form; Construction O
contains all other person-tense combinations.
Generalized Additive Models reveal a three-way interaction among time,
construction, and verb class. With semi-factives, the indicative in
Construction FP declines from the fifteenth century and is nearly
eliminated by the eighteenth, while Construction O remains around
three quarters indicative. The non-factives follow a different
trajectory: both constructions rise and then fall, peaking in the
sixteenth century, with Construction FP generally containing about one
quarter fewer indicatives than Construction O. The preferred model
accounts for 34 percent of the variance. Separate analyses of “saber”
and “ver” show a lag compatible with the Time Separation Theorem,
although the individual-predicate model fits better than the class
model (Kauhanen & Walkden 2018). “Creer” shows a clearer rise-and-fall
pattern, whereas “decir” remains comparatively stable before its later
decline. These trajectories are corpus findings; their interpretation
as specialization of G1 with semi-factives and G2 with non-factives
belongs to the theoretical account, which also requires changing
learning conditions for the non-factive development.
Chapter 6, ‘Explaining Polarity Mood: The first person effect’ (pp.
137–176), tests whether the non-factive changes satisfy the Constant
Rate Hypothesis: when one grammatical option replaces another across
contexts, its underlying rate of replacement should be constant (Kroch
1989). For “decir”, the estimated rates for Constructions FP and O are
compatible. For “creer”, they initially differ. Montero Estebaranz
relates the discrepancy to a concurrent change in complementizer
omission. Medieval first-person clauses could omit “que” in structures
interpreted as more independent, and these structures selected the
indicative. Modeling mood change and complementizer drop as cumulative
effects yields a predicted rate close to the observed first-person
rate. The fit makes a shared underlying change compatible with the
data, but does not establish it independently.
The second half of the chapter addresses the early gap between
Constructions FP and O through G0. Hedging is especially natural with
first-person present predicates, a proposal supported indirectly by
experimental work on English “believe” (Koev, Bill & Mohammadi 2021).
Mathematical analysis and agent-based simulations show that
competition among the three grammars can produce the semi-factive
trajectory. With the same learning advantages throughout, however, the
system settles at intermediate values rather than reproducing the
rise-and-fall history of the non-factives. The account therefore
changes the grammars’ relative advantages across periods. Semantically
interpretable systems are hypothesized to receive an advantage in
adult second-language acquisition, whereas syntactic G2 receives an
advantage in child first-language acquisition. The simulations
establish feasibility under these assumptions, but the book
demonstrates neither the relevant learner proportions nor their
historical timing.
Chapter 7, ‘Explaining Polarity Mood: Other effects’ (pp. 177–203),
develops lines of analysis for clause type, information status, and
NPIs rather than fully fledged theories of all three. For negative
imperatives, G2 is reformulated as dependent mood, following work on
dependent case (Marantz 1991; Poole 2023). In a negative declarative,
two verbs with unvalued mood features can enter a dependency, and the
lower verb receives subjunctive. In a negative imperative, the matrix
verb already bears lexically selected subjunctive morphology, so no
dependency is available and the embedded verb receives unmarked
indicative. This analysis assumes that the relevant verbal and clausal
domains are non-phasal. A study of 1,032 imperative clauses with an
indicative or subjunctive embedded verb shows the indicative rising
from about 65% around 1400 to 92% by 1800. The trajectory is
compatible with G2, but does not establish the dependent-mood
mechanism. The small information-status effect is interpreted as an
incomplete specialization of competing forms by discourse context.
Strong NPIs are treated as a residue of G1: a prior-discourse
presupposition carried by the indicative is proposed to disrupt the
anti-additive environment required for their licensing (Montero,
Doroski & Romero 2025).
Chapter 8, ‘Conclusion and future directions’ (pp. 205–213), brings
the analyses together while treating the three-grammar proposal as
theoretically feasible rather than proven. It identifies indirect
questions, matrix interrogatives, tense, n-words, acquisition, and
comparative Romance developments as priorities for further research.
Three appendices examine “ambiguous complements”, the two
imperfect-subjunctive forms, and an alternative Hubbert fit for
“decir”.
EVALUATION
The book establishes a stronger empirical record than it does a
complete theoretical explanation. Its corpus analysis identifies three
historical developments that an account of Spanish polarity mood must
address: the early decline of the indicative in Construction FP with
semi-factives, the rise-and-fall trajectory of the non-factive
constructions, and the increasing preference for the indicative in
negative imperatives. These developments did not proceed in parallel,
which challenges any account that treats the modern distribution as
the continuation of a single historical mood contrast. Nor does the
corpus identify G0, G1, or G2. Those grammars are the author’s
interpretation of the trajectories, not entities directly recovered
from the data. The negative-imperative counts make the distinction
especially clear: they establish a distributional change, but do not
reveal the feature relations that produced it.
Variational Specialization allows context-sensitive outcomes without
forcing all variation into one categorical grammar. Competing systems
can persist because their relative advantages differ across
semi-factive and non-factive environments. The model nevertheless
needs independent grounds for treating G0, G1, and G2 as grammars
available to learners, along with constraints on how their advantages
change over time. Without those constraints, altering the advantage
structure can reproduce a historical curve without explaining why the
relevant learning ecology existed.
Chapter 6 offers one of the book’s strongest uses of historical
evidence to test its analysis. The initial rate difference for “creer”
could count against the Constant Rate Hypothesis. Montero Estebaranz
instead relates it to complementizer omission, an independently
attested construction associated with more independent first-person
clauses and indicative selection. Modeling the two changes together
produces a rate close to the observed one. This makes a shared
underlying change compatible with the evidence, but it does not prove
the Constant Rate Hypothesis: the structural analysis of
complementizer omission and the cumulative model are themselves part
of the explanation.
The class comparison requires caution. Only two predicates represent
each class, and the individual-predicate model fits better than the
broader class model. The lag between “saber” and “ver” is compatible
with the Time Separation Theorem but does not make lexical meaning
irrelevant. “Ver” is polysemous, and its perceptual, evidential, and
cognitive uses are not separated. “Creer” and “decir” likewise trace
different curves. A larger predicate sample and historical sense
annotation would be needed before the interaction could be attributed
securely to the semi-factive/non-factive distinction.
The simulations make the assumptions behind the non-factive account
visible. Keeping grammar advantages constant does not reproduce the
attested non-monotonic development, so the account changes them across
learner populations. Adult second-language learners are hypothesized
to favor interpretable semantic systems, whereas child first-language
learners favor syntactic G2. This produces the desired trajectory, but
no demographic series establishes that Arabic- and Portuguese-speaking
adult learners were present in the necessary proportions or that
contact changed at the required time. The simulations show that the
historical pattern is possible under stipulated conditions; they do
not establish the contact history or acquisition biases.
G2 remains formally unsettled. Chapter 4 implements syntactic mood
through Agreement between polarity-related probes and a complement
clause, while Chapter 7 derives the negative-imperative pattern
through dependent mood. The latter predicts that a lexically valued
matrix subjunctive should block dependent subjunctive below it. Both
implementations require assumptions about the inventory and valuation
of clausal mood features, while the dependent analysis additionally
requires a non-phasal domain. They capture related generalizations,
but independent evidence is needed to determine whether Agreement,
dependent valuation, or another mechanism underlies G2.
The five effects are not supported equally. Verb class, person-tense
configurations, and negative imperatives are examined diachronically,
whereas information status and strong NPIs are connected to the
historical proposal mainly through synchronic experiments and
theoretical analogy. Interpreting information status as incomplete
specialization is plausible, but the book provides no historical
annotation showing that the effect was once stronger. The NPI proposal
is more explicit semantically: an indicative presupposition is argued
to disrupt the anti-additive environment required for NPI licensing.
Yet this creates an internal question for G1. The accessibility
presupposition p ∈ CS used earlier is not identical to the
prior-discourse presupposition that p belongs to the Common
Propositional Space (CPS), introduced for NPI licensing. A unified
formulation is needed if the NPI restriction is to follow from the
same grammar rather than an additional assumption.
The next empirical steps follow directly from these issues.
Comparative Romance corpora could test whether predicate-class
specialization recurs elsewhere; acquisition studies could examine the
proposed child/adult contrast; and richer historical annotation could
determine how much variation is attributable to lexical sense, genre,
region, or author. Such evidence would show whether the three grammars
have independent support or whether a simpler account can carry some
of their explanatory work.
The book is best suited to researchers and advanced graduate students
in historical linguistics, Romance syntax, formal semantics, and
quantitative language change. Possible-world semantics, feature
valuation, nonlinear models, and simulations make some sections
demanding, but the technical discussion remains tied to the empirical
problem. Its strongest contribution is the differentiated historical
account of polarity mood, particularly the finding that the relevant
constructions did not undergo a single uniform change. The
three-grammar model is a serious attempt to explain that record, but
its grammatical inventory, acquisition biases, and contact history
remain hypotheses rather than conclusions established by the corpus
evidence.
REFERENCES
B-Violette, Laurence. 2019. The development of the polarity
subjunctive in Romance languages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
doctoral dissertation.
Faulkner, Tris. 2021. A systematic investigation of the Spanish
subjunctive: Mood variation in subjunctive clauses. Washington, DC:
Georgetown University doctoral dissertation.
Kauhanen, Henri & George Walkden. 2018. Deriving the constant rate
effect. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 36. 483–521.
Koev, Todor, Cory Bill & Maryam Mohammadi. 2021. Believe is strong but
subjective: Experimental evidence from hedging. In Patrick Grosz,
Luisa Martí, Hazel Pearson, Yasutada Sudo & Sarah Zobel (eds.),
Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25, 480–497. Konstanz: University of
Konstanz.
Kroch, Anthony S. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language
change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199–244.
Marantz, Alec. 1991. Case and licensing. In Germán F. Westphal,
Benjamin Ao & Hee-Rahk Chae (eds.), Proceedings of the Eastern States
Conference on Linguistics, 234–253. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State
University.
Montero, Raquel, Leah Doroski & Maribel Romero. 2025. Spanish
neg-raising: Mood effects on NPI licensing. In Federica Longo &
Daniele Panizza (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29,
1036–1053.
Montero, Raquel & Maribel Romero. 2023. Examining the meaning of
polarity subjunctive. In Suet-Ying Lam & Satoru Ozaki (eds.), NELS 53:
Proceedings of the fifty-third annual meeting of the North East
Linguistic Society, vol. 2, 219–232. Amherst, MA: Graduate Linguistics
Student Association.
Poole, Ethan. 2023. Improper case. Natural Language & Linguistic
Theory 41(1). 347–397.
Quer, Josep. 1998. Mood at the interface. Utrecht: Utrecht University
doctoral dissertation.
Rivero, María-Luisa. 1971. Mood and presupposition in Spanish.
Foundations of Language 7(3). 305–336.
Schlenker, Philippe. 2005. The lazy Frenchman’s approach to the
subjunctive. In Twan Geerts, Ivo Ginneken & Haike Jacobs (eds.),
Romance languages and linguistic theory 2003, 269–309. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Smirnova, Anastasia. 2011. Evidentiality and mood: Grammatical
expressions of epistemic modality in Bulgarian. Columbus, OH: The Ohio
State University doctoral dissertation.
Wallenberg, Joel C. 2019. A variational theory of specialization in
acquisition and diachrony. In Anne Breitbarth, Melissa Farasyn, Lieven
Danckaert & Miriam Bouzouita (eds.), The determinants of diachronic
stability, 245–262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Yang, Charles. 2000. Internal and external forces in language change.
Language Variation and Change 12(3). 231–250.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jose Benavides is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at Indiana
University Bloomington. His research interests include syntax,
semantics, morphology, typology, cross-linguistic variation, and
computational linguistics, with particular attention to Tense, Aspect,
and Mood; complementation; negation; agreement; clitic doubling;
Differential Object Marking; and question formation. His work centers
on Kuki-Chin languages, Romance Linguistics, especially Andean
varieties of Spanish. His current research examines verbal mood
alternation in Southwestern Colombian Andean Spanish through
complementary comparison-based theoretical approaches and truth-based
empirical methods. He aims to develop a research and teaching program
that connects fine-grained grammatical description with comparative
theory and empirically grounded analysis.



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