Estudio contrastivo sobre la realización de la concordancia temporal en español y Catalán

The present contrastive analysis between Spanish and Catalan focuses on the temporal realization of subjunctive predicates dependent on main clauses whose predicates express aoristic past events (e.g., Esta mañana me levantélhe levantado antes de que cantaral cantase/cante el gallo). A previous study (Kempas 2012) showed that, in the cases examined, the tense of the event of the main clause {canté or he cantado) correlates with that of the event of the subjunctive subordinate clause (cante o cantaral cantase) - by analogy. In the present study, the analysis was extended to Catalan, a language in which the only aoristic tense in hodiernal contexts is he cantat. The study was conducted using elicitation tests among 403 Spanish-speaking and 185 Catalan-speaking informants. Of the latter ones, (74.1%) are from Barcelona (Central Eastern Catalan) and 48 (25.9%), from Castellón (Valencian Western Catalan). Overall, the results for Catalan coincide to a great extent with those obtained for Spanish in cases in which the tense of the Spanish subordinate clause is not dependent on the tense of the preceding main clause. By contrast, when the tense of the main clause, referring to a point in time subsequent to the moment of utterance, conditions the tense of the subjunctive subordinate clause, the results for the Eastern Catalans and the Valencians are polarized. In such a case, 61.7 per cent of the Catalans use the past subjunctive in the subordinate clause, and 68,8 per cent of the Valencians the present subjunctive. Another result of interest is the scarce use of the present perfect subjunctive (haya cantado I hagi cantat) when the event expressed by the subordinate clause is prior to the moment of utterance: this compound form has been introduced by neither of the languages studied to the same extent as its indicative equivalent.