What can the subjunctive disjoint reference effect tell us about the subjunctive?

This paper examines the obviation which holds between the pronominal subject of a subjunctive complement to desiderative/directive predicates in Romance and proposes that this obviation is due to the effect of a quasi-imperative operator, located in the head of FinP, on semantic binding of the pronominal subject. True imperatives yield an interpretation “anyone other than the speaker”, while embedded imperatives yield an interpretation “anyone other than the matrix subject”. In addition, such lexically selected subjunctive complements host an uninterpretable W(orld) feature in Force, which must be checked and deleted by the Mood head. In non-lexically selected subjunctive, the W feature is interpretable. It is argued that the core case of subjunctive complements are embedded imperatives; different languages may grammaticalize the interpretable W feature in other complement contexts such that subjunctive becomes the only option and the W feature is uninterpretable. This characterization of subjunctive complement clauses is supported by acquisition and attrition data, which shows that subjunctive is acquired first and lost last in contexts where the W feature is uninterpretable and hence must be deleted by the syntax in order to yield an interpretable structure at the interface.