On the nature of the subjunctive

- Subjunctive occurrences in different language families are analysed.
- Subjunctive is compared to Indicative and to the Balkan non-past form.
- Subjunctive contains an exclusion feature.
- Subjunctive differs from Indicative in being temporally non-anchored.
- Sequence of tenses in Romance is not directly related to the subjunctive.

The objective of this work is to find out more about the nature of the subjunctive by isolating a criterion on which the subjunctive/indicative opposition is based. In the present work, this distinction is viewed as a bipolar opposition between forms that are temporally anchored and forms that are not temporally anchored (in terms of Giorgi and Pianesi's elaboration of the notion of 'temporal anchoring'). I propose that subjunctive forms can be viewed as temporally non-anchored forms in which the element responsible for the temporal anchoring has been substituted with an ExclF in the sense of Iatridou (2000). The paper discusses the morphological occurrences of the subjunctive in several different language families. It accounts for the basic cross-linguistically attested semantic and syntactic properties of the subjunctive. It is argued that the overt morphological realizations do not always correspond to the core semantic properties of the subjunctive.