The Use of the Future Subjunctive in Colonial Spanish Texts: Evidence of Vitality or Demise?

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.

The Portuguese future subjunctive

Although the analysis of the Portuguese future subjunctive mood would contribute to a greater understanding of the general meaning of the subjunctive mood, this verb form has received considerably little attention compared to the other subjunctive forms, namely, the past and present subjunctives. The aim of the present paper is to fill this gap. Using the theoretical perspective of Cognitive Grammar, it will be shown that the Portuguese future subjunctive shares many characteristic features with other tenses of the subjunctive mood. In particular, the analysis shows that the Portuguese future subjunctive can be explained by the concept of dominion. Thus, the present paper provides a conceptually grounded and unified explanation for the meaning of the Portuguese subjunctive mood.

A MORFOLOGIA DISTRIBUÍDA E A NATUREZA DO SEGMENTO /R/ NA FLEXÃO VERBAL DO PORTUGUÊS BRASILEIRO | DISTRIBUTED MORPHOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF THE SEGMENT /R/ IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE VERBAL INFLECTION

<p>Seguindo Oltra-Massuet (1999) e Santana (2016), o presente trabalho adota a análise de que o formativo /r/ que compõe a desinência modo-temporal de alguns tempos verbais do português brasileiro é o Item de Vocabulário que realiza o traço de futuro. Objetivamos mostrar que tal conjectura tem o potencial de unificar cinco aspectos independentes da língua: (i) a semelhança fonológica entre os tempos futuro do presente, futuro do subjuntivo e futuro do pretérito, (ii) a existência do processo sintético e do processo analítico para a realização do futuro do presente e do futuro do pretérito, (iii) o fenômeno de hipercorreção das formas analíticas de futuro, (iv) a semelhança fonológica entre, de um lado, os tempos futuros e, de outro, o infinitivo e (v) o desaparecimento da marca de infinitivo, da marca de futuro do subjuntivo e dos futuros sintéticos na língua.</p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong> <em>Following Oltra-Massuet (1999) and Santana (2016), the present work adopts the analysis that the formative /r/ making up some of the Brazilian Portuguese tense morphemes is the Vocabulary Item that spells out the future feature. We intend to demonstrate that such claim has the potential to unify five independent aspects of the language: (i) the phonological similarity between the future, the conditional and the future subjunctive tenses; (ii) the existence of the synthetic and the analytic processes for realizing the future and the conditional tenses; (iii) the hypercorrection phenomenon involving the analytic forms of the future and the conditional tenses; (iv) the phonological identity between, on the one hand, the future, the conditional and the future subjunctive and, on the other, the infinitive and (v) the loss of the segment /r/ in the infinitive and in the future subjunctive and the loss of the synthetic future and conditional.</em></p><p>Keywords: <em>Verbal Inflection; Theme Vowel; Distributed Morphology.</em></p>

Reconsidering the 'Modal Particles' in Modern Greek

In the present paper we consider the elements na, a and as, which combine with the finite verb and give rise to a variety of modal readings, such as future, subjunctive, etc. On the basis of their distributional similarities and differences, we argue that the elements under consideration are situated in the left periphery and fall into two categories: a and as have a verbal property, while na has a locative one which also underlies its deictic use. This approach allows us to get a better understanding of their current syntactic status, and also has certain implications regarding their diachronic development (e.g. 'grammaticalization'). Our analysis is consistent with the view that there is no syntactic category 'particle' (Zwicky 1985).