A Grammar of Italian Sequence of Tense - Lear

136
A Grammar of Italian Sequence of Tense
The embedded future, telefonerà (will call), instantiates the relation e’ R e, which is the
reverse of the one attributed to the past form. The event e is calling event, bearing the
features: sp and sb. The feature sb agrees with the feature sb of the bearer-of-attitude’s –
i.e., with the main subject’s– temporal coordinate, with the consequence that the
embedded event is interpreted as future with respect to the temporal location of Gianni.
Then, T-to-C movement takes place, and T is copied in C. The feature sp in T gives rise
to the future interpretation of the embedded event with respect to the temporal location
of the speaker, i.e. future with respect to the utterance time.
4.2. In subjunctive clauses
The subjunctive, as discussed in the previous sections, is not a relational tense, in that it
only instantiates a temporal agreement relation between the embedded and the
superordinate form. The lexical item che introducing subjunctive clauses does not
encodes the speaker’s coordinate. For this reason, it can be dispensed with, without
loosing crucial syntactic and semantic information. The temporal interpretation of the
embedded event is therefore simultaneous with respect to the main one
As discussed above in section 3.2, however, even if most DAR contexts are realized by
means of an indicative verbal form, some subjunctive embedded clauses do indeed
exhibit the DAR, as the ipotizzare cases. The syntax of subjunctive clauses with DAR
effects is indeed parallel to the one of embedded indicative clauses. More precisely, in
these cases CD turns out to be impossible, as shown in (39), reproduced here for
simplicity:
(56) Gianni ha ipotizzato *(che) sia incinta
Gianni hypothesized (that) she is(PRES SUBJ) pregnant
Hence, I propose that the syntax of the complementizer in this case is identical to that of
an indicative clause. The differences between an indicative, for instance the one under a
saying verb discussed above, and a subjunctive under ipotizzare lies in the fact that the
subjunctive is still non-relational and can only be interpreted as simultaneous with the
matrix predicate. Hence no past or future interpretation is possible –a derived past
interpretation is available only with a compound form. The DAR arises from the
necessity of evaluating the embedded event with respect to the speaker’s coordinates,
which are realized in the left-most position in the C-layer.