A Grammar of Italian Sequence of Tense - Lear

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A Grammar of Italian Sequence of Tense
be licensed by a non-speaker temporal reference, and the future-in-the-past only by a
superordinate event. 35
6.3. Subjunctive relative clauses
Consider now subjunctive relative clauses. Independently of what determines the
presence of a subjunctive vs. an indicative, it is possible to see that the distribution of
the verbal form is as expected, given the discussion so far. Consider for instance the
following examples:
(108) Gianni vuole vedere un film che lo diverta/ *divertisse
Gianni wants(PRES) to watch a movie which amuses(PRES SUBJ/ *PAST SUBJ)
him
(109) Gianni voleva vedere un film che lo divertisse/ *diverta
Gianni wanted(PAST) to watch a movie which amused(PAST SUBJ/ *PRES
SUBJ) him
If the verb of the main clause is a present tense, then the embedded subjunctive form is
a present. Conversely, if it is a past, then the embedded verbal form is a past. As
expected, the past subjunctive under a present tense, and the present subjunctive under a
past tense are not acceptable. Again, this pattern is expected under the tense agreement
hypothesis: the subjunctive does not express a temporal relation, but only a
morphological relation.
7. Concluding remarks
In this article I discussed the properties of complement and relative clauses in Italian
with respect to Sequence of Tense. I proposed a unified account, able to distinguish
between DAR contexts and non-DAR ones. The DAR effect arises as a double
evaluation of the time of the embedded event. In DAR clauses the embedded event ends
up being evaluated once with respect to the subject’s coordinates –and this is obligatory
35 . Here I will only address the issue descriptively and will not discuss here why the future-in-the-past
has precisely this property. For further discussion, I refer the reader to Giorgi (2008, ch. 4).