Invited Speakers
Alexandra Cornilescu
Specialist in modern linguistics, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest, Romania
PRESENTATION: Subjunctive Thoughts: Mood choice in English and Romanian Complement Clauses
Alexandra Cornilescu (born August 6, 1947, Iaşi, Romania) is a Romanian linguist. She has been a constant promoter of modern theoretical linguistics and is currently professor emeritus at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest, Romania. Her fields of scholarship are: English linguistics, Romanian linguistics, formal syntax, formal semantics, and general linguistics. The ten books that she (co)-authored bear on generative syntax (English Syntax, Complementation in English), propositional semantics (Elements of English Sentence Semantics), pragmatics (The Theory of Speech Acts), and general linguistics (Concepts of Modern Grammar). In the recent years, she has mainly worked on Romanian syntax, as one of the co-authors of The Reference Grammar of Romanian. She translated from English to Romanian and published at Editura Științifică, Bucharest, Romania: John Lyons: Introducere în lingvistica teoretică (Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics), and Noam Chomsky: Cunoașterea limbii (Knowledge of Language).She was Chair of the English Language Department 1990-2004, and Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest, between 2004 – 2012. Since 2016 she has also become a member of the Academy of Europe.
She has held lectures and conferences at various universities in the country and around the world: Duke University (USA), Chapel Hill University, Graduate City of New York, University of Santa Cruz, Davis University, The University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), University of Leiden (The Netherlands), University of Groningen (The Netherlands), University of Antwerp (Belgium), University of Alcala (Spain) Paris III, Paris X (France), University of Toronto (Canada), University of Lisbon (Portugal), University of Padua, University of Venice (Italy), University of Geneva (Switzerland), etc. and from the country "Babeş-Bolyai" University, Cluj Napoca, "Al.Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Western University, Timişoara.
Honours and Awards
• The "Timotei Cipariu" Prize of the Romanian Academy for The Reference Grammar of Romanian. Volume I : The Noun Phrase (co-author), 2015
• Alboiu, G., Avram, A., Avram, L., D. Isac (eds.) PitarMoș: A Building with a View. Papers in Honour of Alexandra Cornilescu, Publisher “EdituraUniversității din București”, București, 2007
• Vice-President of the National Philology Committee for the Accreditation of Academic Titles (2005-2014)
• Editor-in-chief of Bucharest Working Papers of Linguistics
• Member of the Romanian Academy's Revue Roumaine de Linguistique (Fr.) / Romanian Journal of Linguistic (En.)
Abstract of the talk:
Subjunctive Thoughts: Mood choice in English and Romanian Complement Clauses
Alexandra Cornilescu
Specialist in modern linguistics, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest, Romania
Abstract: The paper discusses mood selection (indicative vs. subjunctive) in Romanian and English finite complement clauses. It focuses on the decisive contribution of the semantics of the main verb with respect to mood choice in the complement clause.
The first part is concerned with the choice of a framework which should be sophisticated enough to explain crosslinguistic variation in mood selection for verbs which semantically correspond to each other. It is shown that Giannakidou’s (2009) veridicality theory is a suitable framework for discussing mood selection from a crosslinguistic perspective.
In the second part of the paper we discuss mood selection in Romanian and English, on the basis of Cornilescu (2006) and Giannakidou and Mari (2016). It is shown that English and Romanian are remarkably convergent regarding mood selection, yet subtle differences are to be found. The discussion of certain verb classes, shows that, in contrast to Romanian, English is more sensitive to veridicality and, secondly, more sensitive to assertion features than to presupposition features. For instance in dealing with hope, English ignores non-veridicality as part of the presupposition, and selects the Indicative to signal veridicality in the assertion. Unlike Romanian allows both moods after the verb a spera, ‘hope’.
Keywords: subjunctive, indicative, (non)-veridicality, assertion, presupposition
