Subjunctive/indicative alternation with verba putandi in spoken Italian

This article investigates the alternation between indicative and subjunctive moods in complement clauses introduced by verba putandi (e.g. ‘think’ or ‘believe’) in contemporary spoken Italian. Drawing on spontaneous conversations from the KIParla corpus, the study tests whether mood selection is governed by degrees of epistemic certainty, by extralinguistic factors, or by linguistic properties internal to the construction. Multivariate statistical models evaluate the contribution of several predictors, including the grammatical person and tense of the subordinate verb, its adjacency to the complementizer, the lemma involved, register, and speakers’ educational background. The results show that mood alternation is not primarily driven by epistemic stance or education level, but by usage-based and structural parameters: third-person, present-tense, and adjacent clauses strongly favour the subjunctive, while first- and second-person contexts, past tense, and non-adjacency favour the indicative. Register exerts a measurable influence, whereas educational background does not. Overall, the findings challenge traditional evidential accounts of mood in Italian and suggest that the indicative/subjunctive alternation in spoken language is best understood as a gradient, probabilistic phenomenon shaped by frequency patterns, morphosyntactic dependency, and register variation.