Il congiuntivo nell’italiano scritto e parlato

The article deals with the usage of the subjunctive in contemporary Italian against the background of the grammatical rules that determine its usage in standard Italian. The subjunctive is a phenomenon widely discussed and sometimes viewed as dying in spoken Italian because of difficulties that even Italian users meet when learning its forms. Still the usage of the subjunctive permits the speaker to express small differences in modal meanings within both deontic and epistemic modality. At the same time, it is considerate as a perfect and elegant stylistic means that allows the speaker to express different attitudes in regards to what he or she is saying. The analysis is based on the LIP corpus