The Role of Grammatical Mood in Romance Political Speech

This paper examines grammatical mood as a rhetorical resource in modern Romance political speech, focusing on French, Spanish, and Italian. It addresses a gap between mood theory, which mainly studies semantic, diachronic, and complement-clause patterns, and political discourse analysis, which more often prioritises lexis, ideology, style, and sentiment. Using 15 major political speeches, five per language, the study counts verbal units and classifies them as indicative, subjunctive, imperative, conditional, or non-finite. A supplementary coding of directive constructions examines how obligation is realised beyond imperative morphology. To reduce the confounding of language and genre, a sensitivity analysis recalculates mood distributions within a more closely matched institutional-setting subset. Quantitative results show that the indicative accounts for over half of all verbal units, dominating all three corpora. These findings support its central role in constructing shared political reality, institutional responsibility, and public authority. The subjunctive surfaces less frequently but is functionally significant: in French it often marks contingency, dependency, and procedural limits; in Spanish it carries deontic pressure, moral resolve, and non-asserted possibility; and in Italian it combines irrealis meaning with the register value of educated public speech. The imperative is used least across all three corpora, with most directive constructions realised through non-imperative forms. This paper argues that mood should be treated not merely as a grammatical category but as a mechanism through which politicians stage assertion, distance, obligation, and mobilisation. Its conclusions remain exploratory because of the corpus’s small size and generic diversity; a larger, more balanced corpus is required to confirm and refine these findings across contexts.