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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

mood selection, nominal clauses, el hecho de que, Spanish

College

Humanities

Department

Spanish and Portuguese

Abstract

In A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, David Crystal semantically defines the mood of a verb as the “attitudes on the part of a speaker towards the factual content of the utterance, e.g. uncertainty, definiteness, vagueness, possibility.”1 While Crystal’s definition may give the mood of a verb an orderly appearance, more than one grammarian has appropriately compared understanding the factors leading up to mood selection to untangling a large ball of knotted string. With considerable credibility, most grammarians claim to have organized much of the tangle; however, few can explain how to separate the subjunctive mood from the indicative mood without any catches or snags. For instance, mood selection following the factive nominal, el hecho de que (the fact that), still remains as a knot to be untied.

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