The Romance Subjunctive Schema. Grammaticalisations and Constructionalisations in a Comparative CxG Analysis of Spanish, Catalan, French, and Italian

Abstract

This article applies the principles of Construction Grammar (CxG) to the problem of describing the various subjunctive-constructions in the Romance languages. Departing from a very basic mother construction, all other uses are derived from it via the concept of constructionalisation (c.f. Traugott & Trousdale 2013). The description thus takes the form of a cognitive network that can be represented as a graphic in which all ramifications are represented in a way that allows a synoptic vision of all subjunctive schemas of a given language. These charts are then used for a comparison between various Romance languages. The most important difference appears to be the development of the Honorific-Imperative Construction in all those languages that have developed a formal address-system based on morphologically 3rd person pronouns (Vd., você, vostè); in these languages, morphological subjunctives have given rise to a whole new paradigm of “neo-imperatives”.

Keywords

• constructionalisation
• demodalisation
• insubordination
• modal agreement
• neo-imperatives
• Romance subjunctive constructions