Semantics of regret in Romance languages: structure types, meaning, collocation restrictions

Abstract

The article discusses basic propositional structures describing regret (it's a pity that..., I regret that ....) in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The focus is both on semantics of the given structures and their operation as a means for propositional attitude. Their combination with the verb mood in subordinate clause is considered to be a grammatical means of subjec-tive evaluation.