The Spanish Subjunctive: A Reference for Teachers

Hans-Jorg Busch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317332565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

A Complete Guide to the Spanish Subjunctive is the most complete reference guide to the use of the subjunctive in Spanish. Along with an exhaustive review of published literature on the subjunctive, the book also includes a thorough discussion of the uses and meanings of the subjunctive as well as examples throughout drawn from linguistic corpora such as the CREA database.

The book presents a comprehensive theory of the subjunctive and provides practical rules for understanding, teaching and acquiring the Spanish subjunctive.

This book includes:

"Your Turn" sections that invite readers to reflect on the content discussed and on their own experiences in teaching the subjunctive

A "Synopsis" section that summarizes the content of the work and offers practical suggestions for teaching the subjunctive

Two indexes providing a summary of verb conjugation in the subjunctive and an alphabetical list of expressions used with the subjunctive.

1
Purpose and scope of this book

This book deals with the subjunctive as a grammatical category and its communicative potential. As you can easily see by just glancing at the bibliographical sources at the end of this book, there is a huge amount of literature regarding all aspects of the subjunctive. But despite all that has been written, there is no agreement if all the seemingly different uses of the subjunctive can be reduced to one basic grammatical meaning. On the one hand, there have been many attempts to find a single unifying semantic label, such as ‘non-reality’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘virtuality’, ‘non-assertiveness’, ‘non-factuality’ and others. However, there are always uses that seem to contradict these generalizations. On the other hand, partly because of the impossibility to point out one single meaning, some authors accept or claim that the subjunctive has no meaning at all and that it is just triggered or governed by subjunctive licencing contexts; for example, the meaning of the main predicate or other subjunctive indicators. Therefore what we find in grammars, practical subjunctive guides and textbooks today are often just descriptions of different uses, but not what distinguishes the subjunctive from other moods. This makes it is very difficult, let’s say for language learners, to overcome this hurdle in the Spanish language. Due to the lack of a singular principle, Spanish teachers often resort to providing lists of expressions followed by the subjunctive, combined with semantic and pragmatic (over)generalizations, in an attempt to guide their students.

In this book, the subjunctive, as a formal and systematic manifestation of modality, particularly verb endings, is characterized as a set of morphemes with a general grammatical meaning. The latter cannot be explained in philosophical, semantic, or pragmatic terms, but as a notion that corresponds to all of the specific systematic manifestations in the language. Neither can it be defined as triggered by the meaning of other elements or just as the product of distribution rules.

In this book, the subjunctive is not treated as an object for elaborating or promoting certain grammatical or philosophic theories. The subjunctive is the main subject and focus. Different approaches are used to describe and attempt to resolve the real problems that we have in understanding, describing and effectively teaching the Spanish subjunctive to English speakers.

A common and widely accepted opinion today identifies the indicative with the semantic notion of assertion and the subjunctive with non-assertion of the occurrence expressed by a verb. From a linguistic standpoint, I will define assertion as a main characteristic of absolute statements about the world and an expression of the speaker’s belief, state of mind and intention. The purpose of an assertion is to declare or state directly something that can be true or not. The mood of assertion by social agreement and convention is the indicative. I will show that the subjunctive, on the other hand, is a relative and dependent mode that cannot refer directly to a particular and specific situation but only indirectly through the deictic reference (ego, hic et nunc) of a subordinating predicate.

The discussion of more recent publications about modality and mood will be followed by a more detailed analysis of the syntactic contexts in which we find the subjunctive, that is, in (pseudo) independent, noun, adjective and adverb clauses.

In Chapter 11 I will try to refute the unsubstantiated claim that the subjunctive, especially in America, is disappearing by looking at empiric data and research about mood variation throughout the Spanish speaking world.

At the end of the book, I will outline strategies and practical step-by-step instructions for the teaching of the subjunctive. In the appendix, you can find an alphabetic list of conjunctions that are used with the subjunctive or both moods. There is also an extensive subjunctive bibliography.

2
About the empiric material and the examples used in this book

Most of the authentic examples in this book are taken from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) between the fall of 2013 and the fall of 2016. The CREA is a collection of texts originating from a variety of sources and all Spanish speaking countries. They are digitized and searchable according to certain criteria on-line through the Royal Spanish Language Academy website at http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/crea.

The last version from June of 2008 contains a little bit more than 160 million word stems. The material, mostly written texts, but also transcriptions of oral samples, date from the period 1975–2004. The written texts are from books, newspapers and magazines. The content is divided into 100 categories. Most of the oral examples are from radio or TV programmes. The written part of the corpus consists of 140,000 documents with more than 154 million word stems: 49% of the written corpus comes from books, 49% from newspapers and magazines and 2% from other sources. Fifty percent of the material is from Spain and the other 50% from the different regions in America, the Andes, the Caribbean, the Chilean region, the United States, Mexico, Central America and the Rio de la Plata region.

All the examples in the book taken from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual are marked with <CREA>.

A smaller amount of examples are taken from the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI (CORPES XXI), http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/corpesxxi, which also consists of written texts and oral samples from Spain, America, the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea. It has 25 million word forms from each year starting 2001 and ending 2012.

All the examples in this book that are taken from the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI are marked with <CORPES XXI>.

All the basic examples without an indication of origin are my own.

3
Overview of the subjunctive literature

As already mentioned, there is no shortage of literature regarding the subjunctive.¹ A closer look, however, paints a more accurate picture:

• (1) The bulk of literature consists of theoretical articles that describe partial aspects of the subjunctive from the perspective of a specific linguistic theory in vogue at a given time.² They are mostly written for linguists or ‘insiders’ who are familiar with these theories. They are not usually accessible to ‘outsiders’ and have very limited practical value for teachers and students of Spanish. Published more recently, the collection of articles in Becker/Remberger (2010), Bosque (1990a), Bosque/Demonte (1999) and Rot hstein/Thieroff (2010) also fall under this category.
• (2) A second source of information about the subjunctive is Spanish grammar books.³ Grammars as well are written with a specific theory of language in mind and reflect an underlying ideology, the state and trends in linguistics and other sciences (such as metaphysics, psychology, psycholinguistics, structuralism, ethnography, logic, etc.) of the time. Grammars are usually descriptive, if we ignore the attempts to come up with ‘generative’ grammars. Many of them are also written with the intention to prescribe a certain norm in the use of grammatical structures, particularly the one of the motherland, Spain. This was especially the case of the Grammar of the Royal Spanish Language Academy, until 1931. The descriptions of the subjunctive in Spanish grammars differ in length, but they all have one thing in common: they only give the reader examples of the correct uses from the past. None of them provide readers with clear instructions for generating correct sentences and preventing unacceptable ones. They only list different uses of the subjunctive. None of them, not even the Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española (NGLE), published in 2009 and different in many respects from its predecessors, can pinpoint the abstract systematic meaning of this mood. After considering everything that had been written about the subjunctive until 2009 and after looking at all the uses of the subjunctive mood, the authors of the NGLE came to the conclusion: “From all this we shouldn’t deduce that the merger of the various contexts determining the choice of mood is impossible. It only means that, for now, this integration has not yet been achieved” (2009: 1870).⁴ Obviously, none of the grammar books can be used for teaching the language without a methodological and pedagogical adaptation.
• (3) A third source is book-length monographs. Examples are: Ahern (2008), Fente Gómez (1972), Fernández Al varez/Fente Gómez (1992), Haverkate (2002), Hummel (2001) and Martinell Gifre (1985). They are also written with specific linguistics theories in mind. In monographs, however, the theoretical limitations are often overcome and tend to be secondary in an effort to describe and explain all the different and sometimes contradicting uses of the subjunctive, as well as to extract rules and regularities from them. Many monographs are purely descriptive and lack the methodological and pedagogical tools that are necessary for teachers and learners. However, some do offer practical exercises at the end of the book inviting the reader to apply what they have learned from the analytical part (Borrego et al., 1985: 187–256; Molina, 2006; Navas Ruiz, 1986: 157–201; Porto Dapena, 1991: 259–311; Sastre Ruano, 1997: 245–387). The book by Manteca Alonso-Cortés (1981) doesn’t fall into this group because, according to the author, his study is just an outline of the subjunctive syntax within the confines of Chomsky’s Standard Theory of 1980. A different kind of monograph is the Diccionario de uso del subjuntivo by Pérez/Süss (2010), which is conceived as a reference manual and lists, by alphabetical order, subjunctive indicators with examples and explanations as well as rules and mood terminology.
• (4) A fourth source is manuals that are written solely for the purpose of giving simple and clear rules for the use of the subjunctive. This goal is often achieved by oversimplifying and neglecting all or part of the more theoretical linguistic literature about the topic (Anderson, 1995; McKay, 1976; Vogt, 2008). Borrego et a l. (1985: 8) explicitly warn anyone who studies the subjunctive to be suspicious of simplified explanations.⁵ Unfortunately, the chapters about the subjunctive in most Spanish textbooks fall into this category.
• (5) Since the 1980s, there has been a rapid growth in research on first and second language acquisition and learning (for example Blake, 1985; Collentine, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2010; Farley, 2001, 2002, 2004; Gragera, 2000, 2002; Jegerski/VanPatten, 2014; Kirk, 2013; Krashen, 1990; Lee, 1987; Lee/VanPatten, 1995; Pérez-Leroux, 1988; VanPatten, 1995; VanPatten/Dvorak/Lee, 1987; VanPatten/Lee, 1990). However, this re search does not “automatically translate into pedagogy” (VanPatten, 1995: 179), nor do second-language researchers necessarily have “some special insight into what should happen in the classroom” (VanPatten, 1995: 179). According to VanPatten:

Second-language acquisition research can help instructors understand why their students often perform the way they do, and certain general principles for the language-teaching enterprise can be gleaned from the research …, but second-language acquisition research per se is not about language teaching.

(1995: 179)

• (6) There are relatively few articles that use the results of the subjunctive and second-language-teaching research to study their potential for pedagogical purposes. Some examples are Fukushima (2014f), Gregory/Lunn (2012), Klein-Andreu (1994), Rosemond (1996), Ruiz Campillo (2007, 2008), Stokes (1988), Stokes/Krashen (1990), Stokes et al. (1988) and Tyo (1993).
• (7) There are also studies about the diachronic (historic) and diatopic (regional) variation of Spanish, such as Cano Aguilar (1990), Carbonero Cano (1990), Ferrell (1999), Fontanella de Weinberg (1997), Fukushi ma (1981a, 2001a), Gordon (1964), Guitart (1987), Jensen/Lathrop (1973), Knauer (1998), Lehner (2009), Metz (2013), Nieves Váz quez Núñez (1999), Oro (1975), Puente-Schubeck (1992), Ramirez Luengo (2001), Renaldi (1977), Serrano Montesinos (1996) and Veiga (1989, 1992b, 1993, 1996a).

Notes

1 See: Castronovo (1984) and Navas Ruiz (1990).

2 See the bibliography at the end of the book.

3 Zamorano Aguilar (2005) offers a history of the subjunctive in Spanish grammars between 1771 and 1973.

4 Original quote: “De ello no se deduce que sea imposible el análisis integrador de todos los contextos que determinan la elección del modo, sino más bien que, por el momento, esa integración no se ha conseguido.”

5 Original quote: “que desconfíe de exposiciones simplistas que dan cuenta del subjuntivo español recurriendo a una pareja de conceptos.”

4
The subjunctive

An expression of modality

The subjunctive is an expression of modality which has always attracted the interest of philosophers, grammarians, linguists and anyone trying to understand the mechanisms governing language use. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, distinguished ‘apophantic’ or ‘assertiv’ from ‘semantic’ types of statements. This distinction reflects the characteristic of attr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Purpose and scope of this book
• 2 About the empiric material and the examples used in this book
• 3 Overview of the subjunctive literature
• 4 The subjunctive: an expression of modality
• 5 The subjunctive: the morphosyntactic manifestation of mood
• 6 Attempts to define the meaning of the subjunctive
• 7 The function or systematic grammatical meaning of the indicative, subjunctive and imperative moods in Spanish
• 8 The sequence of tenses of the subjunctive
• 9 The grammatical function of dependent subjunctive clauses
• 10 The communicative potential of the subjunctive
• 11 Mood variation throughout the Spanish speaking world
• 12 Synopsis
• 13 Alphabetic list of conjunctions that are used with the subjunctive or both moods
• Bibliography
• Index