Subjunctive mood in future temporal subordinate clauses: a study of Italian speakers under L1 attrition

Abstract

The native language in an adult multilingual speaker is commonly assumed to remain unvaried across the lifespan. However, during the past decades several studies have shown that phenomena are able to modify the L1 of a multilingual speaker. The changes have been attested to reshape different aspects of the L1, from phonological to morphosyntactic (see Schmid, 2016 for a review). This thesis focuses on this process, defined L1 attrition, in Italian native speakers living in Spain and speaking Spanish for a long time. More specifically, this study aims at investigating a syntactic structure that may be affected by L1 attrition in the afore-mentioned speakers, i.e., temporal subordinate clauses expressing future events. Both languages accept the use of the indicative mood and the future tense in the main clauses of such structures. However, Spanish requires the present tense of the subjunctive mood in the temporal subordinate, whereas the subjunctive mood is unacceptable in Italian; in Italian, the future simple tense of the indicative mood is used, instead. The hypothesis is that Italian native speakers who live in Spain and speak Spanish on a regular basis tend to judge the subjunctive mood in the temporal subordinate clauses (ungrammatical in standard Italian) as more acceptable than Italian native speakers who do not speak Spanish. The hypothesis will be tested via acceptability judgments on auditive items. Such methodology is meant to recreate the linguistic context of occurrence of the clauses and to observe whether the investigated population is undergoing a change in their Italian (L1) competence, thus proving that a process of L1 attrition is taking place.