Lexical causatives and their mood choice: the curious case of recordar

Abstract

This squib revisits the claim that causative predicates uniformly trigger subjunctive complements in Catalan (Rigau, 1981; Quer, 1998). While canonical causatives such as fer ‘make’ require subjunctive clauses, causative recordar ‘remind’ permits the indicative.We argue that mood selection is sensitive not simply to the causative semantics, but to the structural relation between the causative predicate and the embedded proposition. Whereas fer directly embeds the propositional content, recordar introduces it indirectly through a further embedded predicate that is a part of a periphrastic structure. We suggest that this layered structure fits well into the locality effects of subjunctive selection (Quer, 1998) which, in turn, predict the possibility of indicative in clausal complements of recordar.