Subjunctive and Sequence of Tense in Three Varieties of Spanish: Corpus and Experimental Studies of Change in Progress

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause (e.g., Quería que me ayudes (present subjunctive) (instead of ayudaras (past subjunctive)) “I wanted you to help me”). The acceptability of this SOT violation has been argued to depend on two main factors: the semantic class of the main predicate (Suñer and Padilla-Rivero 1987, Quer 1998) and the temporal interpretation of the embedded clause (Laca 2010b). A factor that has been less discussed in the literature, which contributes to the acceptability of the present tense under past, is cross-dialectal variation; in some dialects SOT seems to be enforced more strongly and SOT violations are not very common, whereas in other dialects violations of SOT of the type shown above appear to be fully grammatical (Sessarego 2008, 2010; Del Río 2014; Guajardo 2010). Using corpus and experimental methods, this dissertation examines violations of SOT in three Spanish varieties (Argentinean, Mexican and Peninsular (i.e., European) Spanish) in order to determine what makes violations of SOT more acceptable in certain varieties than others. The corpus study analyzes the amount of variation found in each of the three dialects. It is found that in Argentinean Spanish, violations of SOT occur at a much higher rate (30%) than in Mexican (6%) and Peninsular Spanish (3%). However, no lexical effects are found in any of the three varieties; any embedded verb appears to be able to engage in this process. An acceptability experiment allows us to examine this variation in more detail by manipulating the temporal interpretation of the embedded clause in order to determine whether interpretation of the embedded clause has any effect on the acceptability of the present subjunctive. These results show that interpretation of the embedded clause does play a role, but to different degrees in the three varieties: Argentina presents a very small effect and Mexico and Spain show much larger effects. In addition, the results show that in Argentina, present and past subjunctive are largely in free variation when embedded under a past matrix clause. I conclude that Argentinean Spanish exhibits higher rates of violations of SOT because the present subjunctive is tenseless and therefore free to occur under any matrix tense