Mood as cue to (non-)referential construal in Italian

This paper revisits the semantics of Italian mood from a reference-based perspective. While most accounts treat the indicative–subjunctive contrast in modal terms, I argue that it encodes the referential status of the predicated content. Building on Functional-Cognitive linguistics, I adopt the distinction between States-of-Affairs (non-referential predicated content) and Propositions (referential predicated content). On this view, the indicative instructs the addressee to construe the predicated content as referential, yielding a Proposition. The subjunctive, by contrast, is treated as a marker of downgrading: it either suspends reference altogether, designating a State-of-Affairs, or displaces reference from a prototypically actual-world situation to a hypothetical one, yielding a Hypothetical Proposition. These functions explain mood selection and alternation across complement, relative, adverbial, and main clauses. The analysis shows that subjunctive complements with manipulatives, and verbs of occurrence – traditionally problematic for modal accounts – follow naturally from their SoA orientation. Moreover, the subjectivity–objectivity contrast emerges as a general factor motivating the distribution of the subjunctive and indicative within Proposition domains. Extending the discussion beyond Italian, I argue that this reference-based model provides a principled framework for understanding both intra- and inter-linguistic variation across Romance.