The subjunctive in Spanish and Chinese. A case study of conditional sentences

Abstract

Based on the universality of the value of the subjunctive, this article presents a contrastive analysis of this category in the conditional clause in Spanish and Chinese. The study has been carried out through the revision of the related bibliography and, specially, through a parallel corpus which is made up of two literary works: La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2016), and Hei¹an⁴sen¹lin² by Liu Cixin (2008), as well as the Chinese and Spanish translations. After research, we have shown that semantically, both in Spanish and Chinese the subjunctive is related to possible, impossible, unrealized, unverified, counterfactual, etc.; from the grammatical perspective, in Spanish it’s expressed through a series of systemic and morphological marks, while in Chinese, by multiple forms such as hypothetical conjunctions or particles, modal verbs, negative constructions, which do not constitute a closed paradigm.