The semantics of the Spanish subjunctive

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the Spanish subjunctive as it is used in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) of Spanish. One of the tenets of the NSM approach, as developed by Wierzbicka and colleagues, is its universality: that the lexicon and the syntactic patterns that comprise the metalanguage are found in all languages of the world. The use of the subjunctive in the NSM of Spanish potentially threatens the proposed “universal grammar” of NSM, as this form is not found in all languages and has a language-specific meaning. Following a discussion of the semantics of this form, I will consider the environments in which the subjunctive is used in the NSM of Spanish, namely with want (querer) with noncoreferential subjects, maybe (tal vez), not think (no pensar), and not know (no saber). I will show that with want (querer) and not think (no pensar), the subjunctive does not encode a language-specific meaning, but is used to “index” a notion inherent in the proposition with which it occurs. With maybe (tal vez) and not know (no saber), on the other hand, I will argue that the subjunctive does encode a language-specific meaning, and is therefore a more marked choice in these environments. The analysis shows that different syntactic structures across languages can be semantically equivalent, and the NSM notion of a “universal grammar” is supported. Show more