A Grammar of Italian Sequence of Tense - Lear

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(95) ____buy______invite____now
(96) ____invite____buy_____now
A Grammar of Italian Sequence of Tense
In other words, the only certain temporal relation that can be inferred from (91) is that
the buying event occurred in the past with respect to the utterance event, i.e., to now.
There is no ordering provided by the sentence between the event in the main clause and
that in the relative clause, that is between the inviting and the buying.
Summarizing, this intepretation is due to the fact that in a relative clause the temporal
coordinates of the attitude bearer are not represented in the T projection. In other words,
the contrast between example (91) and example (92) arises from the fact that a sentence
complement of an attitude predicate includes the syntactic representation of the bearer
of the attitude, as originally proposed by Higginbotham (1995) and further elaborated
by Giorgi and Pianesi (2000, 2001a). Conversely, a relative clause does not include the
representation of the subject’s attitude in T, because the main predicate does not express
an attitude of the subject toward the content of the relative clause.
On the other hand, however, the embedded verbal form is an indicative one and, as
such, it is introduced by the indicative-like complementizer, endowed with the speaker’s
temporal coordinate. Therefore, the embedded event undergoes the same mechanism
illustrated above and ends up being temporally located with respect to the utterance
event. Furthermore, the prediction following from the proposal illustrated so far is that
this must be obligatory. This prediction seems to be borned out. Consider the following
example:
(97) Gianni ha invitato una donna che comprerà un vestito rosso
Gianni invited a woman who will buy a red dress
Contrast it with the following one:
(98) Gianni ha invitato una donna che avrebbe comprato un vestito rosso
Gianni invited a woman who would buy a red dress
In example (97) the embedded event must obligatorily follow the utterance time,
contrasting in this with the example (98), where, on the contrary, the future-in-the-past
must follow only the event in the main clause. Again, this is what is expected under the
hypothesis proposed above.