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- Title
Spanish 'Imperfecto' vs. French 'Imparfait' in hypothetical clauses: a procedural account.
- Authors
AMENÓS-PONS, José
- Abstract
In the Spanish protases of if-hypothetical structures, the imperfect subjunctive is connected toirrealis readings, while the imperfect indicative originates either factual interpretations or metarepresentational, echoic readings. Mood choice limits the amount of contextually accessible options. In French, mood choice in if-hypothetical clauses is not available: the indicative mood is compulsory. This has crucial effects on the apodosis: in informal Spanish, the conditional tense is often replaced by the imperfect indicative, while in French this possibility is severely restricted. Tenses contain underspecified procedural instructions that can be accomplished in diverse ways, partly depending on the possibilities given by the whole verbal paradigm. Dissimilar linguistic environments create different interpretive constraints even though a single common procedural meaning underlies the asymmetric uses of the imperfect indicative in Spanish and French.
- Subjects
CONDITIONALS (Grammar); PAST tense (Grammar); ASPECT (Grammar); MOOD (Grammar); LANGUAGE classification
- Publication
Cahiers Chronos, 2015, Vol 27, p235
- ISSN
1384-5357
- Publication type
Article