This article examines dialectal variation in mood choice in
journalistic prose after the adverbials después de que
‘after’ and luego de que ‘after’ in
subordinate clauses of past temporal complex sentences in Spanish. Because
the matrix clause of sentences of this type contains a verb in a past
tense, indicating that an action has certainly taken place, the event of
the verb in the subordinate clause headed by después de
que or luego de que is anterior to this completed event and
is also a necessarily completed event that therefore is in a
prescriptively indicative context. However, data collected from an on-line
corpus of Spanish texts from Spanish-speaking countries and from on-line
periodicals show that journalistic prose from Spain universally opts for
the subjunctive mood in these contexts, whereas Mexico tends to use the
indicative. Other Spanish-speaking countries show varying degrees of
frequency of choice for these moods. Previous approaches to explaining
mood choice have maintained that variation in mood choice in the
complement clause is determined by the intentions of the speaker. The data
in this study refute these claims by demonstrating that the use of the
indicative or the subjunctive mood is well established in Mexico and
Spain, respectively, and variable in the other Spanish-speaking
countries.The author wishes to thank the
College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University for a summer
research grant to carry out this study. Special thanks go to Janet Bing,
Charles Ruhl, and Alfredo Urzúa of Old Dominion University for
their endless patience and attention to detail in reviewing this work. I
would also like to extend my gratitude to Keith Walters of the University
of Texas at Austin for recommending this journal for the placement of this
article.