Competition between the indicative and subjunctive following verba opinandi in pre-classical and classical French

The Bachelor thesis deals with the development in the usage of verb modes following verba opinandi in pre-classical and classical French. An evident change in complementation of these verbs had taken place in the 17th century, namely a decrease of the subjunctive to the benefit of the indicative which became a norm in an affirmative sentence in the end of the century. The theoretical part describes this development through information in old and historical grammars. In the practical part the aim is to verify this information on authentic texts in FRANTEXT, a set of French diachronic corpora. This research enabled to create statistics, specify the theoretical information and find a turning point in the development. It also showed distinctions in the indicative/subjunctive ratio between different sentence types