Il congiuntivo italiano: morte o rinascita?

It is often claimed, both by educated speakers and by researchers, that in contemporary Italian the subjunctive mood is dying out, above all in spoken language. Against this background, the study aims to comment on data gathered in different contexts, and analysed with quantitative as well as qualitative procedures, with special attention for two aspects of the question: the value of the subjunctive on the one hand, and, on the other, the occurrence of analytic forms, obtained with the subjunctive of the modal verb potere (‘can’) plus the infinitive of the lexical verb (e.g. possa essere instead of sia). As a tentative conclusion, it can be suggested that the persisting occurrence of subjunctive forms in modern Italian shows that this mood does have a value, though it is often a pragmatic rather than a purely semantic one. The development of new routines, above all in the contexts of writing for the new media, as well as some often occurring structures suggest that it is not a question of survival: rather, we could describe the present evolution as a sort of re-birth of the subjunctive mood, with new values and possibly the development of new forms.