Quantification and Mood Distribution in Spanish Complements: On the Negative Features of poco/a/s in Spanish

This paper studies mood distribution in the complement of Spanish assertive matrices when the matrix subject is modified by the quantifier poco/a/s. The focus of this study is solely complement clauses, and adjectival and adverbial clauses are not considered. Following , ) account that the distribution of mood in these complements is determined by the “discourse-old” information status of the propositional content of the complement, the main goal is to determine why this quantifier will in fact elicit “discourse-old” propositional contents in the complement. The hypothesis put forward in this study is that poco/a/s has inherent negative features as part of its semantics, negative features that turn assertive matrices into negation matrices. The analysis proposed here accounts for mood distribution in the complement of negation and doubt matrices in Spanish following , ) theory of information structure. Based on the relation between negation and presupposition (; ), the claim is that negation and doubt matrices take complements in subjunctive not because their propositional content expresses a proposition known to be false, but rather a proposition treated by the speaker as present—or active—in the consciousness of both speaker and audience (or a consciousness-presupposed proposition).