Again-One or Two Subjunctives?

Abstract

subjunctive to picturing it as the mode of unreality, and when later he refers to classical tradition and adopts a dual framework he is careful to qualify it: Tiene para nosotros caricter didictico, porque en la realidad los limites se confunden. A pedagogical rule is a rule of thumb. The question is, what is to be the rule in a linguistic analysis? The details of Lozano's new arguments can be looked at later. As an opener I keep to the main line and offer an analogy from the grammar of English. (An identical one can be drawn in Spanish.) It is the category of number, useful as a comparison because it is several degrees less complicated than the subjunctive. The family of languages from which both English and Spanish have descended originally had a dual as well as a plural. The dual (= 2) and the plural (> 2) are if anything easier to distinguish than optative and dubitative. Just as there are verbal expressions which can be classed as optative or dubitative, so there are nominal expressions that can be classed as dual (two, both, either-or, twain, pair, twosome, duo, duet, couple, brace, dyad) or as plural (three, four. . . , many, some, all, various, several). The dual has syntactic reflexes that distinguish it from the plural. For example I raised it with crowbars would be understood as probably referring to more than two; to specify we would prefer I raised it with a couple of crowbars. If someone exclaims Look at those women! we will be surprised if we see only two-we would expect Look at those women! (Only if two is expected are we free not to specify: Look at those lovers! Look at those shoes!) We would not say I squeezed it tight with pliers in the same circumstances as we would say I squeezed it tight with a wrench-pliers is dual and we would say with a pair of pliers. The syntactic evidence for dual versus plural is as solid as that for optative versus dubitative.