Estudio de corpus del español europeo sobre la selección modal en las oraciones valorativas encabezadas por el artículo neutro

This paper analyses mood selection in evaluative noun clauses introduced by the neutral article lo. There exist mutually exclusive theories: while certain authors speculate that mood has an impact on an informative level, according to others the subordinate clause of these syntactic constructions always represents rhematic information, regardless of the mood of their verb. To discover which of these speculations is valid, we analysed 4222 cases in the Corpes XXI and determined the frequency with which indicative and subjunctive appear with different verbs and adjectives in the syntactic structures considered. Data demonstrate that either one mood or another is increasingly used in an exclusive way in conformity with the semantic and frequency of the adjective or verb that induces it. This observation not only is solely compatible with the exclusive rhematic value of the subordinate clause, but also with the other secondary theories on the structures here considered.