Reported Speech in Spanish – Part three

We left off last week by first considering the changes made in the past tense when reporting speech and then by asking the question “but what happens in the subjunctive?”

Spanish Future Tense

Before diving right in to the stormy seas of the subjunctive, let’s talk about “what happens in the future?” Traditionally, it changes to the conditional: Why? There are two ways to understand this change. With the first one, you’ll have to explain to your students that Spanish has two future forms: the periphrastic form (Voy a hablar) and (Hablaré). Take a look at the first form and notice that the idea of the future here emerges from the joining of three elements, but there is no real element of the future in and of itself. With the paraphrase form, it’s clear that the verb IR is conjugated in the present, and we’ve already seen that the present changes to the imperfect in reported speech, so it does here too, which gives us (Iba a hablar). So now we have the characteristics of the future (the paraphrase itself) and the past (the verb in the imperfect form). If you write the forms of the verb in the future on the board and highlight the different endings, we can see that these correspond with the present form of the verb HABER (without the H)… So what change would you have to make? Keeping in mind that the root of the future tense is made up of the entire infinitive form of the verb, we can do the following: maintain the root of the future tense (including irregular verbs) and then we add the imperfect ending (ía) and… we get the conditional! One of the functions of which is to express the notion of the future in a past context.

So if you want to see why the conditional doesn’t change in reported speech, all you have to do is try to think of another verb form that can express that same idea of the future in the past. Since Spanish doesn’t have any form like that, we must keep the conditional to avoid changing the basic meaning of the message.

Spanish Subjunctive Imperfect

When talking about the imperative and its change to the subjunctive imperfect, we can kill two birds with one stone… We’ll start by looking at the subjunctive forms as a group: the present, perfect, imperfect, pluperfect tenses you see in the left column may correspond with the indicative or the subjunctive. Think for just a second about how when making changes from direct speech to reported speech in the past, we have to change the spatial and tense references, and only those two things. So we can confirm that when we come across a subjunctive form, it won’t be altered, which means that the present subjunctive will change to the imperfect in the same way, and the imperfect will change to the pluperfect, also in the subjunctive.

That finally brings us to the imperative and its transformation. It’s important to remember that all of the imperative forms (tú, usted, vosotros, ustedes), in the negative and the positive, are ALWAYS the same as their forms in the present subjunctive. In the mind of a Spanish speaker there is a clear connection between the imperative and the present subjunctive…  So if we can say that the present changes to the imperfect, wouldn’t the imperative change (like in the present subjunctive for six of its eight forms) to the imperfect subjunctive?

Seems logical, don’t you think?

I hope you’ve found these thoughts helpful. See you next week.