Towards a unified account of the Spanish subjunctive mood: Epistemic dominion and dominion of effective control

• The paper offers a unified account of the meaning of the Spanish subjunctive mood.
• It covers a greater array of grammatical contexts than offered by previous studies.
• Focus is on the conceptual relation between the main clause and mood choice.
• The notion of dominion is a main tool for interpreting the subjunctive mood.

The present study analyses the semantics of the Spanish subjunctive mood from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. The proposed hypothesis is that the subjunctive mood designates events that are located outside the conceptualiser's dominion in two alternate ways. In accordance with Maldonado (1995), the subjunctive mood is claimed to designate events that are located outside the conceptualiser's epistemic dominion. However, the present paper goes one step further, extending the notion of dominion to also include the conceptualiser's effective control over the event described by the subjunctive mood. A qualitative analysis of the occurrence of the subjunctive mood in a number of grammatical contexts corroborates the initial claim that the semantics of the subjunctive mood is related to the notion of dominion.