Subjuntive Mood in Complement Clauses in Russian

The Mood category can be found in many Indo-European languages. Most of the studies in this field describes indicative/subjunctive distribution for Romans languages: Spanish and French [Portner and Rubinstein, 2020], Romanian and French [Farkas, 2003], Spanish [Quer. 2001], to name a few, but there are also papers on Greek [Giannakidou, 2009] and Slavic languages, for example Bulgarian [Smirnova, 2012]. Most approaches explain the choice of mood either using the concept of contextual commitment, or via the comparison. First group of theories declares that subjunctive is the unmarked mood, and indicative shows that individual somehow committed to what is declared in the embedded clause ([Portner and Rubinstein, 2012], and many others), while second group of theories assumes that indicative is the unmarked mood, and subjunctive is used when there is a comparative semantics (which is usually described through the ordering of possible worlds). In my proposal, I will show some data from Russian, which has not been sufficiently described. The Russian data challenges most of the existing commitment-based or comparison-based approaches. First, the Russian language (unlike other languages for which this phenomenon is described) allows variability in the choice of the mood of the embedded clause for some predicates (for example, ‘zhdat’ “to wait”). Secondly, the role of ‘by’, which is used together with the morphology of the past tense to denote the subjunctive, but is also found in other constructions, remains unclear. Perhaps some facts from the Russian data can be explained with the help of ideas from [Grano and Phillips-Brown, 2022], who rely on alternatives in their analysis of "want". I will also try to scetch a proposal for other instances of subjunctive mood