Last week the glottologist Daniele Vitali, author of goWare, discussed the adoption of the northern pronunciation for s intervocalic which shows the importance of the prestige factor in the evolution of language. However, an important role is also played by hypercorrectism and generalization, as shown by the revolution in the use of the subjunctive, which is the topic covered in this post.
Image consultants don't like the subjunctive?
In the 80s-90s, politicians began to have the image consultant, and they began to say "I believe it is." The apparent blunder seemed the result of a precise communication strategy: since my ideology is the right one, while that of the opponent is erroneous and mendacious, when I express a judgment I must not underline its questionability through the subjunctive, but rather affirm its incontestable truthfulness using the indicative.
This short-legged trick was a sort of answer to the school teaching according to which (from the glorious grammar of Dàrdano and Trifone, edited and re-edited by Zanichelli) “The subjunctive is the way of possibility, of desire or fear, of subjective opinion or doubt, of the likely or the unreal; it is generally used in propositions dependent on verbs that express uncertainty, personal judgment, affective participation: it seems that he is going away, I prefer that he is going away (but it is not certain)”.
Another reason must have been that, faced with theretreat that was observed in different areas of the country, the subjunctive must have begun to seem like a bookish and outdated verbal mode, which therefore created a separation between an overly plastered official language and the living voice of the electoral people.
From the South to Lombardy
A very large area that, in everyday speech, did not use the subjunctive was the South: I had several examples, from "I can't wait for Christmas" told to me by a Sicilian friend about twenty years ago up to "This is a contradiction that should be addressed" pronounced last year on television by the Abruzzo journalist Alessandro De Angelis.
Traveling around Northern Italy for my studies, however, I didn't take long to realize that another focus of elimination of the subjunctive was the Lombardia, where two of my friends didn't hesitate to slaughter it in sentences in which I would never have replaced it with the indicative.
Since I hadn't noted the examples at the time, I marked one from a televised debate a few years ago, in which a Lombard guest said "There is a risk that this situation will make us fall".
Matter of nuances
On an individual level, it was and is possible to hear a missed subjunctive from people from other regions as well. Without bothering a Tuscan acquaintance of low culture who says "It's as if I can't relax" and "He'd like me to go there with him", I would like to at least quote Massimo Giannini, director of the newspaper "La Stampa", who, discussing the Cospito case he stated to "Otto e mezzo", to criticize the government's attitude: "We cry out to the democratic alarm as if we risk subversion" (present or indicative subjunctive? The fact remains that I would put "rischiamo" in the imperfect subjunctive ).
So it's not always one question of culture: sometimes the feeling that it is better to avoid forms that are too obviously subjunctive is enough, on pain of weakening one's own opinions and observations.
… and also in style
I myself sometimes notice that I no longer use the subjunctive in cases where I would have done so a few decades ago: in the conclusions of the fourth volume of my "Emilian dialects and Tuscan dialects" I wrote "before deciding whether a dialect is Emilia-Romagna or Ligurian, or Lombard, it is necessary to establish what makes an Emilia-Romagna, Ligurian or Lombard dialect".
The "both" seemed dutiful to me, while the "renda" seemed a bit heavy, so I decided to write "rende". In the various re-readings I made of that work before handing it over to the publisher, I was repeatedly tempted to change my mind, but I resisted.
Now that the book is printed, I continue to look at that sentence with a some perplexity: the indicative seems a bit sloppy to me, but I keep finding it in line with what I meant to say.
Instead, I find another sentence that I took from a television debate certainly wrong: "We need a force that is able to intervene". It seems to me that "both" would be needed here because the force in question, being hoped for, does not exist.
The subjunctive to the rescue
The growing confusion about the use of the subjunctive, however, has not led to its disappearance, but to a new phenomenon, namely its overextension.
We could say that from a modal use of the subjunctive you are passing to a automatic use, in the sense that it is always used after "that", as if this conjunction, introducing the "propositions dependent on verbs that express uncertainty, personal judgment, affective participation" (again from Dardanus-Tryphon), always required the same form verbal.
In December 2022, in fact, I found this sentence on Facebook: "I read today that the municipality of Rome has conferred honorary citizenship on Patrick Zaki".
Later I heard, in the videos of the young man youtuber Lombard Marco Crepaldi, formulations such as: "I have met many people who, although they have the opportunity to live alone, do not".
automatic subjunctive
Crepaldi himself, of whose videos I am a loyal follower for content reasons, interviewed the young Letizia, I would say of southern origin, on the his experience among Jehovah's Witnesses.
As can be heard, the interviewee produces a good number of cases of “automatic subjunctive”: “They knew I did very well in school”, “They started targeting me when they found out I liked reading”, or “I tried to tell them that there were so many things I didn't like and that I didn't like ”.
It is a collection of the subjunctive precisely in the areas of Italy that seemed to pave the way for its elimination? Maybe, but I remember that even in my high school class, made up of Bolognese, there were those who over-extended the subjunctive.
It is true, however, that at the time a few indignant reprimands by the professors who had just corrected their homework were enough to bring the overextenders back into the ranks of grammaticality.
The uncertain future of the overextended subjunctive
So what to conclude? What will happen to the subjunctive? Unlike the case of s sonorous intervocalic, which seems to have reached a good point in its definitive affirmation, I would consider the fate of the overextension of the subjunctive still uncertain. In this case, in fact, the prestige factor it goes in the direction of a respect for the scholastic norm, and a certain one is to be expected resistance against new use.
Which, however, has its side mechanicalness: in an era in which fewer and fewer books are read, and therefore fewer and fewer people form their own spoken and written style on traditional models, syntactic crystallization and simplification they are a strong temptation compared to the "uncomfortable" need to adapt the choice of verbal mode to the communicative intention.
We'll see.
. . .
°°°°Daniele Vitali, from Bologna, was a translator for the European Commission for years. He has to his credit various glottology works on languages and dialects, including “Linguistic portraits: the Romanian” (Inter @ lia 2002), “Do you speak Italian-Luxembourgish? Notes on the language of the Italians of Luxembourg” (Inter@lia 2009), “Russian pronunciation for Italians” (with Luciano Canepari, Aracne 2013), as well as the great “Dizionario Bolognese-Italiano Italiano-Bolognese” (Pendragon 2007 and 2009, with Luigi Lepri), “Emilian dialects and Tuscan dialects. Linguistic interactions between Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany” (Pendragon 2020) and “Mé a dscårr in bulgnaiṡ. Manual for learning the Bolognese dialect” (Pendragon 2022).
