Sequence of Tense violations in subjunctive clauses: A corpus-based comparison of Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish

Brenda Laca; Imran Hossain; Leticia López

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.408

Sequence of Tense violations in subjunctive clauses

A corpus-based comparison of Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish

Authors

Brenda Laca Universidad de la República https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9131-7710
Imran Hossain Universidad Católica del Uruguay https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0087-4018
Leticia López Universidad de la República https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5506-762X

PDF

Abstract

Starting from the assumption that the occurrence of Sequence of Tense violations in subjunctive argument clauses is sensitive to the type of clause, we examine the distribution of [Present under Past] occurrences violating the double access requirement (i.e. those in which the event in the subjunctive clause precedes Speech Time) in two closely related Spanish varieties, Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish. Our results show that the two varieties clearly differ both in the frequency of occurrence of the [Present under Past] pattern and in the sensitivity of SoT violations to the type of clause, with the Argentinian variety exhibiting greater frequency of the pattern and less sensitivity to the type of clause. This supports our assumption that the Argentinian variety is more advanced in the process of change affecting the temporal specification of the present subjunctive as a morphological form.

Keywords

sequence of tense, subjunctive clauses, Rioplatense Spanish, corpus analysis

References

Abeillé, Anne & Danièle Godard (eds). 2021. La grande grammaire du français. Arles: Actes Sud.

Altshuler, Daniel. 2016. Events, states and times: An essay on narrative discourse in English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110485912

Anand, Pranand & Valentine Hacquard. 2008. Epistemics with attitude. Proceedings

of SALT 18. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v18i0.2484

Bates, Douglas M., Machler, Martin, Bolker, Benjamin & Stephen Walker. 2015. Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67: 1-48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.

Colonna, Saveria, Laca, Brenda, López, Leticia & Eduardo C. Soares. 2022. When the present lies in the past: [Present under Past] in subjunctive clauses in Uruguayan Spanish. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.7904

Crespo del Río, Claudia. 2014. Tense and mood variation in Spanish subordinates: the case of Peruvian varieties [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Crespo del Río, Claudia & Sandro Sessarego. 2021. Concordantia Temporum in Andean Spanish, In M. Díaz Campos (ed.), Handbook of variationist approaches to Spanish, 345-359. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429200267-31

Davies, Mark. 2016. Corpus del Español. Available online at http://www.corpusdelespanol.org.

Eddington, David E. 2020. A corpus study of grammatical differences between Uruguayan and Argentinian Spanish. Isogloss 6(6): 1-15 https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.90

Giorgi, Alessandra. 2010. About the speaker: Towards a syntax of indexicality (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 28) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.9793/elsj.30.1_392

Grano, Thomas. 2017. Control, temporal orientation, and the cross-linguistic grammar of trying. Glossa 2(1): 94. 1–21. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.335.

Guajardo, Gustavo. 2017. Subjunctive and Sequence of Tense in Three Varieties of Spanish: Corpus and Experimental Studies of Change in Progress. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, San Diego. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26651.57121

Guajardo, Gustavo & Grant Goodall. 2019. On the status of Concordantia Temporum in Spanish: An experimental approach. Glossa 4(1): 116. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.749

Heim, Irene. 1992. Presupposition Projection and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs. Journal of Semantics 9(3): 183-221. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/9.3.183

Kauf, Carina & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2022. Underspecified (embedded) tense semantics. https://www.heddezeijlstra.org/_files/ugd/533bc0_4a67838fa7c84615abd8377a422fc993.pdf

Laca, Brenda. 2010. The puzzle of subjunctive tenses. In R. Bok-Bennema, B. Kampers-Manhe & B.Hollebrandse (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected Proceedings of Going Romance 2008, 171–194. Groningen: John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.2.10lac

Laca, Brenda. 2015. On the temporal orientation of intensional subjunctives. In J. Gueron, (ed.) Sentence and Discourse, Hommage to Carlota Smith, 23-44. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198739418.003.0002

Laca, Brenda. 2019. Whatever happened to Sequence of Tense? Letras 99: 8-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.25730.53443

Ogihara, Toshiyuki & Yael Sharvit. 2012. Embedded tenses. In R.Binnick (ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 638–68.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195381979.013.0022

Picallo, Carme. 1984. The Infl node and the Null Subject Parameter. Linguistic Inquiry 15(1): 75-102

Picallo, Carme. 1985. Opaque Domains. Ph.D. thesis, CUNY.

Quer, Josep. 1998. Mood at the interface. Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/417711

R Core Team. 2020. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. www.R-project.org

RAE-ASALE. 2009. Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, Espasa Calpe.

Raposo, Eduardo. 1985. Some asymmetries in the Binding Theory in Romance. The Linguistic Review 5: 75- 109. https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.1986.5.1.75

Sessarego, Sandro. 2008. Spanish Concordantia Temporum: an old issue, new solutions. In M. Westmoreland & J. A. Thomas (ed.) Selected Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 91-99. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Sessarego, Sandro. 2010. Temporal concord and Latin American Spanish dialects: a genetic blueprint. Revista Iberoamericana de Lingüística 5: 137-169.

Stowell, Tim. 2007. The syntactic expression of tense. Lingua 117(2): 437– 463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2005.08.003

von Stechow, Arnim. 2005. Semantisches und morphologisches Tempus. Neue Beiträge zur Germanistik 4(2): 9-54.

Suñer, Margarita. 1990. El tiempo en las subordinadas. Tiempo y aspecto en español. In I. Bosque (ed.), Indicativo y subjuntivo, 77-105. Madrid: Cátedra.

Suñer, Margarita & José Padilla-Rivera. 1987. Sequence of tenses and the subjunctive, again. Hispania 70(3): 634-642. https://doi.org/10.2307/343448

Sveberg, Tore. 1998. L’emploi des temps du subjonctif chez Françoise Sagan. Kristiansand. Centre d’Études Supérieures d’Agder. http://hdl.handle.net/11250/139311

Wurmbrand, Susi & Magdalena Lohninger. 2023. An implicational universal in complementation: Theoretical insights and empirical progress. In Hartmann, Jutta M. & Angelika Wöllstein, (eds.), Propositional Arguments in Cross-Linguistic Research: Theoretical and Empirical Issues, 183-229. Tübigen: Narr.

Zagona, Karen. 2014. Sequence of tense and the features of finite tenses, Nordlyd 41(2): 261-272, (special issue on Features ed. by Martin Krämer, Sandra Ronai and Peter Svenonius). University of Tromsø and The Arctic University of Norway. https://doi.org/10.7557/12.3419

Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2012. There is only one way to agree. The Linguistic Review 29: 491–539. https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2012-0017

Sequence of Tense violations in subjunctive clauses

A corpus-based comparison of Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish

Authors

Abstract

Keywords

References

DOI

Published

How to Cite

Downloads

Funding data