Semantic features in the acquisition of mood in European Portuguese

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system-epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [- epistemic] contexts, the selection of a subjunctive complement is especially troublesome under [+ epistemic; - veridical] predicates. A corpus analysis, meant to characterize the input to which children are exposed, showed that this pattern of mood distribution is not entirely explained by verb frequency or by mood variability in the input. We argue that children go through a stage in which they are not able to map mood morphology to the required sum of features and give priority to epistemicity only. Thus, while in early stages the [+/- epistemic] contrast influences mood choices, the [+/- veridic] contrast (particularly in epistemic contexts) does not. Despite that, we provide new evidence that children rely on the relevant semantic features throughout the process of mood acquisition.