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In:The Grammar of Interaction: Epistemicity, information management and discourse in language use
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 46] 2025
► pp. 318–343

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From subjunctives to imperatives

The Romance subjunctive schema and its ramifications

 | University of Bamberg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 17 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.46.12rad
Abstract
In the literature concerning the Romance subjunctive, there have always been two camps: One group of linguists sees the subjunctive as a means for expressing a wide array of modal meanings, while the other one sees this modality rather expressed by the context while the subjunctive as such is frequently only a concomitant and automatised feature, increasingly devoid of any meaning in and of itself. A compromise between these two positions might be the observation that there are clear-cut cases of subjunctives chosen over indicatives for semantic reasons, as there are also clear-cut cases of obligatory and therefore semantically empty subjunctives.
This state of affairs has been argued to be due to a set of subjunctive constructions at different diachronic stages in an overall process of grammaticalisation (or rather: constructionalisation) which slowly turns an erstwhile meaning-bearing inflection into an element of modal agreement by which subordinate clause verbs agree with the modality / illocution of the main clause. An empirical study of this hypothesis would imply determining the percentages of meaning-bearing freely chooseable subjunctive uses as opposed to those that are simply triggered by some context element (main-clause verb, conjunction etc.) (cf. Radatz 2021).
I will argue here that the percentage of meaning-bearing subjunctives tends to be overrated because many imperatives are still considered to be subjunctives on the basis that their morphology coincides with this mood. There are, however, good arguments for analysing the forms in ¡Espere aquí! / Preparin els tíquets! / Faça-me um favor! no longer as subjunctives but as full-fledged imperatives — a phenomenon conspicuously absent in languages like French or Occitan. An analysis will be proposed which represents the various uses of Romance subjunctives as a constructional network informed by Traugott / Trousdale (2013), allowing for a direct comparison between the various Romance languages and a visual representation of the various stages of constructionalisation (cf. Radatz 2023).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Romance subjunctive schema: A CxG-analysis
    • 2.1Non-Assertion Subschema [S [que Vsubj / ind]
    • 2.2Modal Agreement Subschema [[Vtrigger ] / [Conjtrigger] [que Vsubj]]
    • 2.3Protasis construction
  • 3.Subjunctives in independent main clauses? A flagrant case of insubordination!
  • 4.The Orphaned Subordinate Subschema: From insubordination to Neo-Imperatives
    • Honorific-Imperative Construction
    • Plural-Imperative Construction
    • Negative-Imperative Construction
    • Embedded-Imperative Construction
  • 5.Neo-Imperatives are no longer “Subjunctives”
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (46)
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