ABSTRACT
Unconditionals (UCs) are sentences expressing the irrelevance of a number of potential options or counterarguments to the content of some particular utterance, as in Whether or not it rains, I’ll go for a walk. The specific semantic relationship that UCs hold with conditionals, concessives and free relatives has been analyzed in the last years, but the syntactic structures that UCs display in the Romance languages have not been investigated in depth. In this chapter, a detailed syntactic classification of Romance UC structures is proposed, with particular attention to Spanish. This classification combines V or C initial structures with the presence/absence of ever-like markers in relatives. It is argued that the key factor unifying all UC varieties in Romance is the subjunctive mood, here interpreted as an epistemic modal in UC patterns. Ever-indefinites provide similar meanings in English’s UCs because they are licensed in intensional environments. Mood-doubling, a distinctive property of UCs in Romance, results from the split of sentential operators, a phenomenon also attested in other conjoined structures.
