Subjunctive da as a tense operator

The most obvious link that can be made between the use of da in the future-tense construction such as the one in (185) and the use of da in subjunctive-type complements such as the one in (184) is related to the morphological form of the verb that appears in such contexts, the latter being associated with the same PNP morphology in both types of environments:

(190) a. Ivan che da dodje.

John FUT PART come3.sg.PNP

‘John will come.’

b. Hochu da dodjesh.

want1.sg. that come2.sg.PNP

‘I want you to come.’

This also constitutes another common property that can be observed between Croatian and a language such as Greek in this context: as noted earlier, Greek also uses the same PNP verb form in both subjunctive and future-tense equivalents of Croatian examples in (190). In the following paragraphs, we will see that this is only one in a series of common patterns that can be observed between Croatian and its Balkan counterparts when it comes to constructions of this type.

Recall, first of all, that the perfective verbs of the type exemplified in (190) were shown to exhibit deficient temporal properties in languages such as Greek and Bulgarian, which meant that they could not define clausal tense on their own, hence the ungrammaticality of the examples below:

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(191) * Kerdisi o Janis. (Greek)

win3.sg.PNP the John

(192) * Az napisha pismo. (Bulgarian)

I write1.sg.PERF letter

The same property can be observed with PNP verbs in Croatian as well, as we can see on the basis of grammaticality contrasts resulting from the use of perfective vs. imperfective aspect in simple matrix clauses:

(193) a. Ja stizhem.

I arrive1.sg.IMPERF b. * Ja stignem.

I arrive1.sg.PNP

(194) a. Ja chitam knjigu.

I read1.sg.IMPERF book b. * Ja prochitam knjigu.

I read1.sg.PNP book

This suggests that the same type of temporal analysis that was applied to Greek PNP verbs by Giannakidou (2009), and that I extended later on to their Bulgarian counterparts, may be valid in the context of Croatian as well. In other words, Croatian PNP could also be seen as a temporally deficient verb form that contains a dependent tense variable t which needs to be bound by a separate operator in syntax.⁷² This analysis will be confirmed once we look in more

72 The only slight difference between Croatian and its Balkan counterparts in this context is that Croatian PNP can be used to denote matrix future tense without a separate operator being overtly present in the structure. Thus, the examples such as those in (193-194b) are significantly improved if we insert an adverbial that forces a future-tense reading:

(i) Ja stignem sutra.

I arrive1.sg.PNP tomorrow ‘I arrive tomorrow.’

Nevertheless, rather than claiming that this constitutes an exception with respect to the observed behavior of perfective verbs in other Balkan languages, it makes more sense to claim that the PNP in such cases is also bound by a separate tense operator in syntax, the only difference being that the latter is phonetically null. I leave a more detailed discussion of this type of construction for future work.

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detail at the types of environments where the use of PNP morphology becomes acceptable, i.e.

those where the PNP verb is accompanied by the particle da.

This is where the common properties of the item da used in future-tense constructions such as the one in (190a) and the item da used in subjunctives such as the one in (190b) begin to emerge more clearly: in both cases, these elements can be seen as accomplishing a tense-operator function and binding the dependent t variable associated with the PNP verb, which would explain why the use of PNP is perfectly acceptable (in fact preferred) in these contexts, as opposed to the matrix clauses where the PNP is unaccompanied by the element da. The latter can also be seen as providing the same semantic function in both of these types of constructions, i.e. it establishes the temporal anchor for the future-directed interval within which the PNP verb can be interpreted, which is the same type of function as the one we observed earlier on with its Greek and Bulgarian counterparts. The only difference between the two types of clauses in (190) in this context is related to the syntactic environments they appear in and to the type of item that selects da: in matrix future-tense clauses, such as the one in (190a), da is selected by the future auxiliary (shortened grammaticalized form of the verb htjeti ‘want’), which provides direct access to utterance time, and hence the temporal anchor established by da corresponds to the utterance time; in embedded subjunctive clauses (as in (190b)), da is selected by the matrix predicate, and hence the tense anchor it establishes corresponds to the reference time of the matrix predicate. Nevertheless, the semantic tense-anchoring function associated with this item is otherwise the same in both cases. Hence, it makes sense to conclude that the element da in the future-tense construction such as the one in (190a) and the element da in the subjunctive complements of the type exemplified in (190b) constitute the same linguistic item, accomplishing the same tense-operator function.

What this implies, in turn, is that the subjunctive-related da and the indicative-related da cannot be the same item: as we saw earlier on in (185) (reproduced below), the two da’s are associated with two distinct structural positions:

(185) Znam da che Ivan da dodje.

know1.sg. that FUT John PART come3.sg.PNP

‘I know that John will come.’

Therefore, while the indicative da is a classical Comp inserted in C, subjunctive da should be analyzed as a particle, inserted somewhere lower down in the structure below C (more on that

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a bit later). Moreover, since the temporal function of the subjunctive-related da in Croatian was shown as equivalent to the one associated with subjunctive particles in Bulgarian and Greek (i.e. they all render the PNP verb syntactically legitimate and semantically restrict its temporal scope in the same way), this would strongly suggest that the Croatian subjunctive da should be analyzed on a par with its more overtly marked counterparts in other Balkan languages. In order to further confirm this conclusion, I will introduce some additional properties that Croatian subjunctive da will be shown to share with subjunctive markers in other languages, properties which are more specifically related to mood and modality.