The literature on mood in Romance languages has identified the conditions that lead to the use of Subjunctive or of the Indicative moods. For syntactic contexts where only one of these moods is allowed, its obligatoriness follows from the semantics of the main clause, but, in cases of mood choice, the option is pragmatically driven.

The occurrence of the Subjunctive mood in sentences describing facts is commonly seen as problematic, given the relation between Subjunctive and non-veridicality. Existing semantic explanations for the Subjunctive in complement clauses of factive verbs link the occurrence of this mood in such contexts to gradability of the main clause’s predicate. However, such account faces empirical problems, and is not extendable to other contexts where the Subjunctive occurs even if the sentence describes a fact of reality.