Subjunctive mood in Spanish in GF

Question

What is the correct grammar tree in GF for generating sentences in Spanish:

a) that contain subjunctive mood.

b) which the subject is a sentence too.

an example:

me gusta que mi jefe no trabaje hoy

Answer 1

Let's construct this piece by piece.

bossDoesntWork_S : S = mkS negativePol (mkCl (mkNP i_Pron boss_N) work_V) ;

Checking out the table, we see that both indicative and subjunctive are retained.

> cc -table bossDoesntWork_S
s . CommonRomance.Indic => mi jefe no trabaja
s . CommonRomance.Conjunct => mi jefe no trabaje

So now we need to give this as an argument to some VS, which forces out the subjunctive. Let's construct one—there is a ready-made constructor in ParadigmsSpa, called subjVS : V -> VS.

likeThat_VS : VS = subjVS like_V ;

Now let's test that:

> cc -one mkS ( mkCl (mkNP i_Pron) likeThat_VS bossDoesntWork_S)
yo gusto que mi jefe no trabaje

The subjunctive is correct, but unfortunately, the dative agreement isn't working properly. That's a known issue, and I have tried to fix it, but adding it on top, in a way that everything works properly, makes the whole grammar just really slow. (I wonder if it was more feasible, if Spanish didn't use the Romance functor, but that's not something I'm willing to try. :-P)

The complete grammar

So, the subjunctive part of this is easy. Here's a grammar for you to try out.

resource Subjunctive = open SyntaxSpa, LexiconSpa, ParadigmsSpa in {
  oper
    likeThat_VS : VS = subjVS like_V ;

    bossDoesntWork_S : S = mkS negativePol (mkCl (mkNP i_Pron boss_N) work_V) ;

  -- lexicon

    like_V : V = <like_V2 : V> ; --treat LexiconSpa.like_V2 as V
    work_V : V = mkV "trabajar" ;
}

Note on dative verbs

So what to do with dative verbs? For V2, you can just flip the subject and the object. But for VS, it's trickier, and would require ~ugly~creative hacks.

For now, I would suggest postprocessing, as in this answer. The good side with a dative verb as a VS is that the verb will always inflect in 3rd person singular, so you don't have the situation like "me gustas tu" vs. "me gustan ustedes". You can safely postprocess "yo gusto que" into "me gusta que".

If the RGL is fixed to include proper handling of dative verbs, I'll update this answer.