$&RQFHSWEDVHG$SSURDFKWRWKH6XEMXQFWLYH $P\(*UHJRU\3DWULFLD/XQQ Hispania, Volume 95, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 333-343 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hpn/summary/v095/95.2.gregory.html Access provided by Utah State University Libraries (12 Jan 2016 05:30 GMT) A Concept-based Approach to the Subjunctive Amy E. Gregory Pilgrim School; Los Angeles, CA, USA Patricia Lunn Michigan State University, USA Emerita Abstract: Linguistic research has shown that Spanish speakers mark clauses with the subjunctive when they consider the information value of those clauses to be low. Despite widespread agreement among linguists, however, the information-value approach to the subjunctive is largely ignored in textbooks and workbooks. This article explains how the information-value explanation works and suggests ways of incorporating this insight into classroom explanation. Keywords: assertion/afirmación, information quality/calidad de información, linguistic description/ descripción lingüística, mood contrast/contraste modal, non-assertion/no-afirmación, pedagogical grammar/gramática pedagógica, pedagogical linguistics/lingüística pedagógica, Spanish subjunctive/ subjuntivo español L anguage teaching has changed a great deal in the last few decades. The focus has become communication (the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning), and agreement has emerged that grammar explanations should not be the focus of the communicative classroom. At the same time, linguistic explanations of grammar have become more descriptive and explanatory. These parallel developments have produced an anomalous situation: while textbook formats and classroom activities have changed a great deal, grammar explanations in the textbooks and classrooms have not. The explanations presented in many textbooks and workbooks are often far from the best that linguists have to offer; indeed, they may not be informed by linguistic research at all. We argue here that the insights of theoretical linguistics can improve pedagogical explanations of the subjunctive (and, by extension, those of other grammar topics). We do not claim that improved explanations will render complex topics simple, obviate the need for input, or cause acquisition to happen; we argue only that linguistically adequate explanations should be one of the tools available to foreign language teachers and students. The defining characteristic of linguistic description is that it is data-based; an adequate linguistic description has to account for what native speakers say (and, with the rise of discourse analysis, for what they say in context). This approach is particularly valuable in the modern classroom, because students now have access to authentic Spanish on websites, on television, and in movies, and they should be provided grammar descriptions that account for the authentic language to which they are exposed. This article examines the disconnect between popular explanations of the Spanish subjunctive, and what linguists have discovered about the mood contrast in Spanish. The first part of this article synthesizes the line of modern linguistic research that has converged on an explanation of the subjunctive/indicative contrast in Spanish, and shows how conventional approaches to the subjunctive fail to take advantage of the insights provided by this explanation. The second part of the article translates linguistic explanation into pedagogical practice for the communicative classroom. AATSP Copyright © 2012 Hispania 95.2 (2012): 333–43 334 Hispania 95 June 2012 A Linguistic Description of Spanish Mood Mood, the usual English translation of the term modo, is a misleading word in and of itself, implying a kind of radical subjectivity on the part of the speaker. Subjectivity, carefully defined, is in fact relevant to the subjunctive/indicative distinction (as discussed below), but a more revealing translation is mode. It will be argued here that subjunctive and indicative are different modes of conveying information, which reveal, in Bolinger’s (1968) prescient description, the “volitional involvement” (29) of the speaker in organizing and presenting information. Terrell and Hooper (1974), in a much-cited paper, showed that the syntactic patterns of the sentence are the expression of underlying communicative goals: “The speaker makes certain decisions about the information he wishes to convey” (492). Based on Terrell and Hooper’s (1974) insight, Lavandera (1983) showed how “[t]he subjunctive-indicative morphology attached to every occurrence of a conjugated verb is a quick, clear instruction about the presence or absence of ‘assertiveness’ for each statement” (232). Lunn (1989) continued this line of research by showing how assertion is linked to information quality: “Information that speakers of Spanish are likely to encode in the indicative is relevant information” (690), or information that is both reliable and newsworthy. Mejías-Bikandi (1994) added the speaker’s point of view to the discussion of discourse organization and information value: “In order to predict the mood of a complement clause in Spanish, we have to take into consideration what the speaker’s intentions are. . . . When it is not the intention of the speaker to present P (a proposition) as part of some individual’s view of reality, P is not asserted and the subjunctive mood will be used” (900–01). And Gregory (2001) used the metaphor of cognitive maps: “Speakers locate those propositions considered to be information in their deictic center and they distance themselves from those propositions they consider as (or want to represent as) lacking informational value” (108). In summary, this approach to subjunctive/indicative is based on speaker evaluation of information quality. Speakers will mark information they feel no need to assert—either because it is unreliable (doubtful, untrue, future, etc.) or because it is uninformative (already known)—with the subjunctive; they will mark information they consider worthy of assertion with the indicative. The mood contrast is not, contrary to Collentine (2010), based on the notion of truth value, a logical construct that is both misleading and inadequate for this purpose. As Mejías-Bikandi (1994) has shown, analyzing the mood contrast pragmatically sheds light on Spanish data that were previously problematic. The key to the pragmatic approach lies with the speaker’s intentions rather than with truth value. Pragmatically, speakers assert a proposition, using the indicative, to indicate that the proposition provides information about some person’s view of reality; if this is not the speakers’ claim, the proposition will not be asserted and the subjunctive is used. Speakers may choose not to assert a proposition even if they do consider the proposition to represent some individual’s view of reality when, for example, they take a proposition as given (already known to the interlocutors) in order to comment on it.1 Simply put, in complex communicative situations—which are mirrored syntactically by complex sentences—speakers of Spanish can use grammatical mood to rank the information value of clauses. They can use the indicative to assert the information contained in a clause, an option that is always available, even in subordinate clauses. Or, they can assert the main clause but not the subordinate clause. Rarely, they can choose to use the subjunctive in both clauses (e.g., Quisiera que Ud. me explicara esto), in which case the complete lack of assertiveness is understood as extreme politeness. The analysis outlined here coincides partially with common explanations of the subjunctive in textbooks (high school and university level), including some intended for university advanced grammar courses, but also diverges from them in significant ways. Table 1 summarizes the nonresearch-based approach to the subjunctive, which simply repeats conventional grammatical rules that have been passed down from textbook to textbook. Gregory & Lunn / A Concept-based Approach to the Subjunctive 335 Table 1. Non-research-based Approach to Grammatical Mood in Spanish Prevalent Concepts Used in Describing the Spanish Subjunctive Semantic Uncertainty notion Unreality Futurity Non-existent / Non-specific entity Emotion Contrary-to-fact when used in conjunction with “if” clause The first four semantic notions correspond to the category of low-value information. This overlap between the two approaches, though, masks an important difference between them. The semantic-notion analysis implies that it is the subjunctive itself that expresses these notions. However, if we look at example sentences for each of these notions, we see that uncertainty, unreality, etc., are not expressed by the (identical) verbs in the subordinate clauses, but by the main clauses. (1) Dudo que sea así. (2) No es que sea así. (3) Volveré cuando sea así. (4) Quiero uno que sea así. There is a crucial difference between saying that speakers use the subjunctive to mark low-value information (which may be uncertain, unreal, etc.), and saying that the subjunctive conveys these semantic notions in and of itself. When the latter argument is made, it leads to some perfectly logical but inaccurate conclusions. Students who are taught that the subjunctive “means” doubt, etc., often conclude that, given their understanding of the word si, the subjunctive should always appear after this word. As a result, they use the present subjunctive after si (e.g., *Si tenga tiempo, te llamaré), in the face of all the input, spoken and written, in which these incorrect forms fail to occur. This error is invited by textbook statements that say that the subjunctive “means doubt” and students whose understanding is based partly on this misinformation may actually resist counterevidence to it. The information-quality approach to the subjunctive can explain both the use and the non-use of the subjunctive after si. When it is possible to assert an if–then relationship between the clauses (e.g., Si tengo tiempo, te llamaré), the indicative is used.2 When, in contrast, the hypothetical situation is known to be inoperative, the past subjunctive is used (e.g., Si tuviera tiempo, te llamaría). Counterfactual information (i.e., information the speaker knows to be false) is the least likely candidate for assertion, and is highly marked. The semantic notion of emotion presents a different problem.3 Emotion is useless as a linguistic category because it is impossible to define; in other words, it is not a category that a child learning to speak Spanish as a first language would be able to understand or use. How would a child figure out how much emotion, and what kind of emotion a speaker must feel in order for the subjunctive to appear? How could a child understand why some expressions of emotion appear with the subjunctive while others do not? There are many sentences in Spanish that convey emotion on the part of the speaker, but do not contain the subjunctive. (5) Creo con toda el alma que todos somos hijos de Dios. (6) Te apuesto cualquier cosa a que esto va a acabar mal. And, there are sentences in which the main clause describes lack of emotion, but which never theless contain the subjunctive. 336 Hispania 95 June 2012 (7) No estoy sorprendido de que hayan roto. (8) Me da igual que a José no le guste. The information-quality analysis can explain these apparent anomalies. The subordinate clauses of sentences like (5) and (6) contain information that the speaker thinks is worth asserting (Todos somos hijos de Dios, Esto va a acabar mal), and that is therefore marked with the indicative. In contrast, sentences like (7) and (8) make sense only if the hearer already knows that a couple has broken up, or that José doesn’t like something. (Indeed, a hearer unaware of these facts would surely demand a clarification.) The subjunctive verbs in (7) and (8) refer to information that is assumed to be known to speaker and hearer alike, and it is this lack of need for assertion that produces the use of the subjunctive.4 In contrast, the speaker’s evaluation of this information is not known and thus requires assertion, which produces the use of the indicative in the main clauses of these sentences (No estoy sorprendido, Me da igual). Once we abandon emotion as an explanatory device, it can be seen that the informationquality explanation is also valid for sentences like (9) and (10) below. In these sentences, there is certainly no emotion expressed, but the factive nature of the information in the subordinate clauses simply requires no assertion. (9) El (hecho de) que EEUU sea un país rico tiene consecuencias culturales. (10) Aunque Brasil esté en Latinoamérica, no es un país hispanohablante. Why Use a Linguistic Approach to the Subjunctive? What is wrong, after all, with using an approach to grammar that a linguist would not agree with? Research into this question, such as that of Negueruela and Lantolf (2006) and Negueruela (2003, 2008) has only just begun. We do know that inaccurate descriptions can actually invite misunderstanding, and good students are often the ones who are led astray, because they take generalizations to their logical conclusion. One such mistake has already been mentioned: students who have learned that the subjunctive “means” doubt, etc., expect always to find it after si. So, despite all the input in which the combination si + present subjunctive fails to occur, students construct sentences like this anyway. Similarly, students will not use a form that “means” doubt to refer to something that is bound to happen, and so produce sentences like *Voy a volver a casa cuando se acaba esta clase. According to the assertion/non-assertion analysis, acabe must be used in this sentence because the future is an inappropriate candidate for assertion in this context. A linguistically sound description is a form of support for teachers, who are freed from having to invent ad-hoc answers to questions from students. Novice teachers depend on textbook explanations; thus, it is imperative that adequate explanations of the mood contrast, among other concepts, be incorporated into teaching materials. The fact that grammar is no longer the focus of language classes does not mean that grammar is not taught or that students no longer ask questions about it. They ask, for example, why the subjunctive is not always used after si, why it is used to refer to situations that are (barring the end of the world) going to happen, and why it marks information introduced by the phrase el hecho de que. It is helpful to teachers to have a framework for their own understanding of the topic (rather than having to improvise explanations), and it is helpful to students to hear “This sentence exemplifies the assertion/ non-assertion contrast in the following way.” In order for research-based generalizations about grammar to be useful in the classroom, they have to be couched in accessible language, and they have to be translated into appropriate exercises and activities. The rest of this article will address these needs. Gregory & Lunn / A Concept-based Approach to the Subjunctive 337 User-friendly Approaches to the Subjunctive A metaphor often used to talk about grammar is that it is a “tool” used by speakers to construct sentences. This metaphor is helpful in understanding mood choice, because it points to the role of the speakers as tool-users. Mood choice provides speakers of Spanish with a tool for presenting information, and speakers use this tool in the service of their communicative purposes. It is at this point that the concept of subjectivity can profitably be introduced: speakers choose how to present information, and they can use grammatical mood to fine-tune the presentation of information. Child native speakers who must figure out how to use the subjunctive can observe that people use it to mark certain kinds of information, but they cannot observe what these speakers really think or feel. Classroom learners, then, should not be engaged in trying to ferret out “truth” and “emotion,” but instead should concentrate on how mood choice is used to convey information. The Spanish language has many ways of indicating where the speaker is with respect to what is said. Demonstrative adjectives (este, ese, aquel) and adverbs of location (aquí, allí, allá) indicate distance from the speaker. Verb tenses locate events in time with respect to the speaker’s present. And, the personal pronouns (yo, tú/usted, él, ella) identify other people with respect to the speaker. What might the mood system of Spanish organize with respect to the speaker? The answer is: information. Information can be organized according to its relevance to the speaker’s communicative needs. Speakers use the indicative to mark information they want to present as highly informative, and the subjunctive to mark information that they want to present as low-value. Speakers who have doubts about whether information is true can introduce it with disclaimers like dudo, no creo, no me parece—and mark it with the subjunctive. Speakers who wish to convey that a proposition, true or not, is not news can background it to evaluative material—and mark it with the subjunctive. The criterion for assignment to the non-newsworthy category is negative; the contrast is between newsworthy information and everything else. In other words, assertion is the default mode. This can be analogized to how a chocolate lover looks at desserts: there are chocolate desserts and then there is everything else. Desserts in the non-chocolate category do not all taste the same (they might be apple-flavored, or pistachio-flavored, or vanilla-flavored, etc.), but what they have in common is that they are not chocolate. In the same way, Spanish speakers put information in the non-newsworthy category for various reasons: they might have reservations or doubts about information, or—very differently—they might assume it is already known and so they can express an attitude or value judgment towards it. Thus, Spanish speakers use indicative verb forms to relate newsworthy information (chocolate) and subjunctive verb forms to signal that some part of a message is not newsworthy (not chocolate).5 Towards a Concept-based Approach to the Spanish Subjunctive Negueruela and Lantolf (2006) and Negueruela (2003, 2008) advocate for the quality of grammatical explanations while articulating a concept-based approach to pedagogy rooted in sociocultural theory. Their pedagogical approach is rooted in Concept-based Instruction (CBI), which, as the name suggests, promotes concepts as the basis of instruction. Negueruela (2008) describes a process designed to make the learner “think through these notions, not simply about them” (196). Thus, according to Negueruela, grammatical concepts such as tense, aspect, and mood must not be represented with ad hoc rules of thumb, but rather with an abstract explanation of the concept that is as complete as possible in order for learners to be able to generalize their use of the concept across a broad range of circumstances. Most importantly, for learners to internalize conceptual meaning, they must engage in conceptual manipulation. Subsequently, the internalization of concepts as tools of the mind promotes a coherent and systematic emergence of forms (203).6 In the case of the mood contrast in Spanish, the concept of mode must become the 338 Hispania 95 June 2012 focus of well-designed classroom activities so that learners begin to recognize and understand the contexts that give rise to its use. For CBI, conceptual manipulation takes the form of verbalization. Negueruela (2003) studied the process of verbalization in sixth-semester Spanish students, in which, as a homework activity, they explained out loud to themselves their own use of mood choice in a written assignment. Learners used a flowchart/didactic model that illustrates the mood selection process to reflect on their own performance. The following flowchart (Figure 1) is based on Negueruela’s, but provides a more explicit breakdown of the information-value concept of mood choice. Mood choice Is information in the subordinate clause worthy of assertion or confirmation? yes no (4) Has the information already been evaluated as unreliable? Is the information already known because it’s ... ... (1) common knowledge? subjunctive indicative ... (2) been mentioned in the current or previous discourse? ... (3) right before the speaker’s eyes? subjunctive subjunctive Is the information unknowable because it refers to ... (7) Is the information known to be false (counterfactual)? ... (5) ... (6) a something future or someone time? non-existent or unidentified? subjunctive subjunctive subjunctive imperfect subjunctive Figure 1. Flowchart for Mood Selection7 The following is a list of independent clauses that correlate (by number) to each use of the subjunctive found in the flowchart. This list of correlations should be provided with the flowchart to aid learners in analyzing subjunctive use that they encounter in authentic materials—not in texts created for language learners. The list is not exhaustive and is only meant to give an idea of the types of sentences that a native speaker might construct. Since some of these independent clauses might work in a category other than those assigned here, and some also permit a clause marked with the indicative, this is in no way meant to be a prescriptive list. Gregory & Lunn / A Concept-based Approach to the Subjunctive 339 Learners may need to use the list of main clauses below with the flowchart in order to begin to notice examples in input. 1, 2, 3 — Already known information: Me sorprende que… Me alegra que… Te acostumbras a que... Es difícil que… Es bueno/malo que… Es de esperar que… Me parece increíble que… No puedo creer que… Es una lástima que… 4 — Information evaluated as unreliable: No creo que… No es verdad que… Es dudoso que… Dudo que… No es cierto que… 5 — Referent non-existent or unidentifiable: Busco un libro que... Necesito un amigo que... 6 — Event to occur at a future time: Deseo que… Espero que… Quiero que… Ojalá que… 7 — Counter-factual (normally indicated by one of the following): como si si imperfect subjunctive, conditional What Can You Do in Class? Guidance regarding mood choice needs to be provided for learners from simple recognition of subjunctive morphology all the way through marking low-value information with that morphology. The subjunctive appears primarily in subordinate clauses, so we cannot expect learners, the majority of whom are not consciously aware of subordinate clauses in English, much less in Spanish, to be able to attend to subjunctive endings (Collentine 1993, 1995) in what they read and hear when their main task is get meaning from the input. Nor is it enough to employ a linguistically sound description of the subjunctive; it is also necessary to help students see that this description actually corresponds to what they hear and read. If both of these criteria are met, then grammar explanations can help students notice details that they once ignored, and attending to details can help them to comprehend what they hear and read, thus creating a mutually reinforcing relationship between grammar and input. The following are some general suggestions for classroom activities, which are adaptable to a range of levels, useful for helping students notice grammar in context: 340 Hispania 95 June 2012 1. Comment on your own teacher talk. We know that students will not learn a language without input, so we use Spanish for classroom management in order to increase student exposure to the language. However, students understand their task to be that of figuring out what they are being told to do, and this often precludes paying attention to structure. So, it is useful to stop after having said, for example, Quiero que hagan solo la primera parte, and ask ¿‘Hagan’? ¿Qué forma del verbo es ‘hagan’? Doing this a few times in each class period will help students to notice the subjunctive and the contexts in which it appears. 2. Recycle readings and dialogs for the purpose of identifying examples of subjunctive usage. Modern textbooks are hundreds of pages long, and contain a wealth of examples of real language. Unfortunately, despite all of this content (or maybe because there is so much of it), students rarely revisit material from previous chapters. It can be useful, however, to go back to a text and ask students (who now, presumably, understand what the text says) to identify certain features of it. Students can be asked to underline all the subjunctives, for example, or all of the subordinate clauses. Such exercises may seem simplistic, but they are, in fact, useful both to draw students’ attention to details that they could not focus on the first time they read the text and also to gauge student perception of syntactic or morphological features. Students who cannot identify subordinate clauses, for example, will not benefit from a description of the subjunctive based on clause type (noun, adjective, adverb). 3. Design activities that will force students to pay attention to grammar. Scavenger hunts or collections are another way of focusing student attention. Students, individually or in groups, can be given a list of phenomena, and told that they have fifteen minutes (or a class period, or a week, or a term) to find as many examples as possible.8 The phenomena can be more or less sophisticated, and the search can be conducted in textbooks or in a wide range of additional sources, according to the level of the students. Lower-level students can be asked to hunt for subjunctive verbs, for example; higher-level students can be asked to hunt for specific forms of the subjunctive, or for types of usage (subjunctive used to refer to the future, known information, contraryto-fact information, etc.). 4. Be aware of the gulf between mechanical manipulation of grammatical forms (the staple of workbook exercises) and creative language use, and develop a range of exercises that are neither wholly mechanical nor completely creative. For example, intermediate students can be asked to finish open-ended sentences in as many ways as possible: Quiero que el profesor de esta clase…, Quería que mi profesor el año/ semestre pasado…, Busco un regalo de cumpleaños para mi madre/novio/hermano que… 5. Since textbooks do not include activities that spotlight the discourse/pragmatic nature of the mood contrast and encourage learners to make connections between the subjunctive form and the communicative function of marking low-value information, create your own structured input activities that highlight the lack of information value of known information, making salient that the main point of communication is not what is mentioned in the subordinate clause and marked with the subjunctive. Intermediate learners can begin to understand the functions of the mood contrast through structured input activities, while at the same time negotiating meaning as part of activities with a more global communicative purpose. Gregory & Lunn / A Concept-based Approach to the Subjunctive 341 6. The verbalization (self-explanation), described in Negueruela (2008) as a homework activity, can be used as a means of promoting the internalization of the informationvalue concept of the mood contrast. Learners can record themselves explaining mood choice in native speakers’ texts and then in their own production. They should feel free to explain in either Spanish or English, because the goal is to think through the concept of information-value rather than practicing output in Spanish. Negueruela (2008) suggests that internalization of the concept will lead to more native-like use of the forms. The possibilities are endless, and current textbooks contain many useful exercises that could be adapted to CBI. The idea is to give students the opportunity to reflect on the information value of indicative/subjunctive morphology in context while engaging them in activities with a genuine communicative purpose, thus giving them opportunities to manipulate and internalize the concept of mood contrast. Conclusion Many things have changed in foreign language classrooms, and creative techniques for encouraging student performance in the four skills continue to emerge. There is a plethora of research-based pedagogical recommendations that are moving the profession away from non-communicative-based instruction. Krashen’s (1982) emphasis on comprehensible input, along with the natural approach (Krashen and Terrell 1983), helped initiate the communicative language teaching movement. Concept-based Instruction is the latest—and most radical—in a series of efforts to integrate grammar explanation into the communicative classroom, following such strategies as Focus On Form (Long 1991), Input Enhancement (Sharwood-Smith 1991), and Processing Instruction (Farley 2004; Lee and VanPatten 2003; and VanPatten 2004). Skepticism about the overt teaching of grammar is an acknowledged part of the communicative movement, so it is not surprising that the changes in the teaching of grammar that have emerged from this shift have had more to do with limiting the amount of time spent on grammar than with the nature of the explanations themselves. The role of grammar in the communicative classroom cannot be explored as long as we think of grammar as being adversarial to communication. So, instead of asking questions to which we know the answers (“Should we dedicate the bulk of class time to talking about grammar?”), we should ask: “How can accurate descriptions of grammar facilitate progress in the communicative language classroom?” The argument that classroom grammar should be based on descriptive grammar is not a claim that explicit instruction will lead directly to acquisition, or a challenge to research findings about orders of acquisition or processability. It is, rather, an appeal to improve classroom grammar by capitalizing on available knowledge. NOTES See also Lambrecht (1994) for a discussion of truth value versus assertion/non-assertion. In many dialects of Latin American Spanish, speakers use the present subjunctive after no sé si (e.g., No sé si tenga tiempo), where the introductory clause makes clear that they cannot assert the following information. These same speakers, though, do not use the present subjunctive after si alone. 3 Emotion is the ‘E’ in a number of mnemonic devices used to teach the subjunctive, such as WEIRDO (wish-will/emotion/impersonal expressions/request/doubt-denial/ojalá). Mnemonic devices are meant, as the name suggests, to remind students of what they have learned, but they have come to constitute the entirety of grammar explanation in some classrooms. This one, for example, explicitly suggests that the subjunctive expresses semantic notions (wish-will, emotion, etc.), which flies in the face of linguistic analyses. Syntax (impersonal expressions) is mixed in too, with no explanation that many impersonal expressions (es verdad, es cierto, etc.) do not appear with the subjunctive. 1 2 Hispania 95 June 2012 342 In a way, the use of emotion as an explanatory device is the result of context-free exercises. The fill-in-the-blank format of many exercises offers no context for mood choice beyond the sentence. And, when there is no context in which known information is embedded, then all that is left as a cue is “emotion.” 5 In fact, there is a semantic relationship between negation and the subjunctive, which this metaphor captures very nicely. 6 In discussing the distinction between L2 acquisition and development, Negueruela (2008: 189–90) underscores that L2 development is semantic rather than formal in nature; in other words, it does not have to do with the morphology, processing procedures, and form-to-meaning mappings discussed in SLA research, but rather has to do with the internalization of conceptual categories. 7 It might be misleading that all but one of the paths in the flowchart leads to the subjunctive. Recall that the subjunctive is a negative choice; it is used when a speaker negatively evaluates the information value of a proposition. As a result, in spite of all the paths leading to the subjunctive option, indicative is more frequently used than subjunctive because it is the mode used to assert/inform/affirm. This side of the chart is not developed here. 8 With a tip of the hat to Terrell Morgan of The Ohio State University, who often uses this technique in his classes. 4 WORKs CITED Bolinger, Dwight. (1968). “Postposed Main Phrases: An English Rule for the Romance Subjunctive.” Canadian Journal of Linguistics 14: 3–30. Print. Collentine, Joseph. (1993). “The Development of Complex Syntax and the Selection of Mood by Foreign Language Learners of Spanish.” Diss. University of Texas, Austin. Print. ———. (1995). “The Development of Complex Syntax and Mood-selection Abilities by Intermediate-level Learners of Spanish.” Hispania 78.1: 122–35. Print. ———. (1997). “Irregular Verbs and Noticing the Spanish Subjunctive.” Spanish Applied Linguistics 1: 3–23. Print. ———. 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