“No creo que + «haya venido» / «viniera/viniese»”: El pretérito perfecto e imperfecto de subjuntivo del español peninsular

Författare

Andreas Björklund

Summary, in English

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and clarify the usage of the verbal forms present perfect subjunctive (haya cantado) and imperfect subjunctive (cantara/cantase) in the construction “no creo que…” in peninsular Spanish. It will analyse which the factors that encourage the use of the one form or the other are and highlight the factors that allow the usage of the form that diverges from the norm. The hypothesis proposes that one tends to use the present perfect subjunctive when denying the occurrence of x in a period prior to the time of utterance and the imperfect subjunctive when denying the occurrence of x in a specific moment in the past. The investigation is based on 163 cases that are extracted from CREA (Reference Corpus of Current Spanish) and the kind of negation they provide is analysed. It is concluded that, even though there are tendencies that confirm the hypothesis, there are exceptions for each verbal form. The factors that permit the usage of these exceptions are: a partial negation, i.e., a negation of the way the situation is described rather than a negation of the entire action, in the case of the present perfect subjunctive, and the occurrence of certain temporal adverbs in the case of the imperfect subjunctive. The factor that incites the exceptional usage of the forms is the degree of current relevance and proximity to the time of utterance that the speaker wishes to apply to the situation.

Avdelning/ar