The subjunctive in Spanish

e se-ra alternation in Spanish subjunctive

In this paper I take a look at a classic problem in Spanish morphosyntax, namely the alternation between the forms -se and -ra in the Imperfect Subjunctive (Imperfecto de Subjuntivo). Research on this topic hasmainly focused on sociolinguistic variation, and has been done almost exclusively with impressionistic data and speaker’s intuitions. I address the problem from a usage-based perspective,...

Case Studies in Eliciting the Spanish Subjunctive in

Previous research has shown that the Spanish subjunctive is a vulnerable mood in the process of acquisition for adult heritage speakers. Specifically, the subjunctive use in optional contexts tends to be more prone to simplification (i.e. in adjectival clauses). This subjunctive emerges in monolingual Spanish-speaking children as early as two years of age and reaches more adultlike development ...

The Spanish subjunctive: Procedural semantics and pragmatic inference

The Subjunctive in That Complements

In this section we consider the distribution of the subjunctive and the indicative moods in English complement clauses and argue that the observed patterns can mostly be explained on semantic grounds. Traditional grammarians have long noticed that the opposition between the indicative and the subjunctive mood is semantic, each grammatical form being suitable in a coherent class of contexts. For...

Extending the sociolinguistic variable to the syntactic level: The case of para + lexical subject + infinitive/subjunctive in Venezuelan Spanish

Previous studies have analyzed variable use of the infinitive versus the subjunctive in clauses following the preposition para (‘for, in order to’) in Spanish in terms of discourse, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. However, no study has analyzed this phenomenon according to extralinguistic factors, nor determined which linguistic factors are the most significant predictors of this va...