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Abstract
Yucatec Spanish has been considered a contact variety of Spanish that carries manyfeatures attributed to years of contact with Yucatec Maya on the Yucatn Peninsula in Mexico.While many studies have documented and discussed mood in Spanish, subjunctive/indicativeselection in this contact variety has previously been understudied. Grammatical mood overtlymarks modal information in a verb phrase with specific morphology. In Spanish, two moods can be triggered in the subordinate clause embedded under the complementizer que: the subjunctive and the indicative. A key distinction in Spanish is the assertion/non-assertion divide (Terrell & Hooper 1974) and (lack of) pragmatic presupposition (Lunn 1989, 1995), which explain the distribution of subjunctive selection. Yucatec Spanish has been identified as an indigenous contact variety in which differences between bilingual and monolingual groups have been observed in phonetics (Solomon 1996, 1999; Michnowicz 2009, 2011), syntax (Michnowicz 2015, Klee 2009), and pragmatics (Bove 2018).The current dissertation begins with an overview of mood selection in Yucatec Spanishand provides a statistical analysis of mood selection in that contact variety. A forced choice task was distributed to 165 participants throughout the Yucatn Peninsula. Data gathered from the participants show that while some predicate types pattern with prescriptive grammars (such as volitional predicates) or previous accounts of Mexican Spanish (such as emotive predicates), epistemic predicates present unique mood selection patterns. Next, I offer a semantic analysis of mood that focuses specifically on doxastic predicates (or belief predicates). Adopting Giannakidous (1998, 2015) notions of (non)veridicality and the epistemic subjunctive, I argue that a speaker selects the subjunctive to weaken commitment to a proposition, and while certain structures favor a particular mood selection, the epistemic subjunctive is available any time the speaker interprets that the utterance may be nonveridical (i.e., neither true nor false). Based on these findings, I posit that mood in Yucatec Spanish is motivated by speaker interpretation of the (non)veridicality of a proposition.