A Complete Guide to the Spanish Subjunctive

A Complete Guide to the Spanish Subjunctive is the most complete reference guide to the use of the subjunctive in Spanish. After an exhaustive review of published literature on the subjunctive, and a thorough discussion of all the uses of the subjunctive, including those that have generated much discussion, for example after ‘el hecho de que’, causative predicates and verbs of emotion, as well as after certain conjunctions, such as ‘aunque’ and ‘después de que’, the book presents a comprehensive theory of the subjunctive and provides practical rules for understanding, teaching and acquiring this linguistic structure. The book contains a wealth of authentic examples throughout drawn from linguistic corpora such as the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) and the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI (CORPES XXI), large databases compiled by the Royal Spanish Language Academy and available on-line at http://www.rae.es/. This book includes: • A ‘Synopsis’ section that summarizes the content of the work and offers practical suggestions for teaching the subjunctive. • An extensive alphabetical list of expressions used with the subjunctive or the subjunctive AND the indicative. • An extensive and up-to-date bibliography of subjunctive literature.

Introduction Purpose and scope of this book About the empiric material and the examples used in this book Overview of the subjunctive literature The subjunctive: an expression of modality The subjunctive: the morphosyntactic manifestation of mood Attempts to define the meaning of the subjunctive What happens when you explain the use of the subjunctive (only) with generalizing semantic and pragmatic terms? Attempts to negate the meaning of the subjunctive The concept of assertion Newer studies that use the concept of assertion and related concepts to describe the meaning of the subjunctive The definition of assertion in this book Assertion and subordination in German Assertion and subordination in English The function or systematic grammatical meaning of the indicative, subjunctive and imperative moods in Spanish The formal distinction between indicative and subjunctive in Spanish The indicative The subjunctive The uses of the subjunctive in (pseudo) independent clauses The imperative The conditional The sequence of tenses of the subjunctive The grammatical function of dependent subjunctive clauses Noun clauses Verbs and expressions that are followed by the subjunctive in noun clauses Wishes and orders Opposition, prohibition,

Hans-Jörg Busch is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware.